the fifties, it has seen better days.
Cottages hang clumsily together on ledges in the mountains, 7,400 feet
above the sea, standing in their own vast uncultivated grounds. People
are of the Lolo origin, but all speak Chinese; their ways of life,
however, are aboriginal, and still far from the ideal to which they
aspire. They are poor, poor as church mice, dirty and diseased and
decrepit, and their existence as a consequence is dreary and dull and
void of all enlightenment. The women--sad, lowly females--bind their
feet after a fashion, but as they work in the fields, climb hills, and
battle in negotiations against Nature where she is overcome only with
extreme effort, the real "lily" is a thing possible with them only in
their dreams. By binding, however, be it never so bad an imitation, they
give themselves the greater chance of getting a Chinese husband.

I stayed here the Sunday, and as I went through my evening ablutions,
among my admirers in the doorway was an old woman, who in gentlest
confidences with my boy, explained awkwardly that her little daughter
lay sick of a fever, and could he prevail upon his foreign master, in
whom she placed implicit faith, to come with her and minister? Lao Chang
advised that I should go, and I went. My shins got mutilated as I fell
down the slippery stone steps in the dark into a pail of hog's wash at
the bottom. Having wiped the worst of the grease and slime onto the mud
wall, by the aid of a flickering rushlight I saw the "child," who lay on
a mattress on the floor in the darkest corner of the room. I reckoned
her age to be thirty-five, her black hair hung in tangled masses, the
very bed on which she lay stank with vermin, two feet away was the fire
where all the cooking was gone through, and everywhere around was filth.
When she saw me the "child" raised her solitary garment, whispered that
pains in her stomach were well-nigh unendurable, that her head ached,
that her joints were stiff, that she was generally wrong, and--"Did I
think she would recover?" I thought she might not.

Rushing back to my medicine chest, I brought along and administered a
maximum dose of the oil called castor, and later dosed her with quinine.
In the morning she was out and about her work, while the old mother was
great in her praises for the passing European who had cured her child.
After that came the deluge! They wanted more medicine--fever elixir,
toothache cure, and so on, and so on--but I stood f