h through this
pervading beauty of the earth, but has to plod onwards step by step
along a toilsome roadway, enables the scenery to be so impressed upon
one's mind as to be focussed for life in one's memory. One is held
spellbound; these are the pictures never forgotten. Here I sit in a
corner of the earth as old as the world itself. These mountains are as
they were in the great beginning, when the Creator and Sustainer of all
things pure and beautiful looked upon His handiwork and saw that it was
good.

The country here seems so vast as to render Nature unconquerable by man:
man is insignificant, Nature is triumphant. Railways are defied; and
these mountains, running mostly at right angles, will probably
never--not in our time, at least--be made unsightly by the puffing and
the reeking of the modern railway engine. They present so many natural
obstacles to the opening-up of the country, according to the standard we
Westerners lay down, that one would hesitate to prophesy any mode of
traffic here other than that of the horse caravan and human beast of
burden. Nature seems to look down upon man and his earth-scouring
contrivances, and assert, "Man, begone! I will have none of thee." And
the mountains turn upwards to the sky in_ silent reverence to their
Maker, whose work must in the main remain unchanged until eternity.

It is now 12:30, and we have fifty li to cover before reaching
Ch'u-tung. We sit here to feed at a place called Siao-shui-tsing, a
sorry antediluvian make-shift of a building, where in subsequent travel
I was hung up in bitter weather and had to pass the night. The people,
courteous and civil as always, show a simple trustfulness with which is
associated some little suspicion. I gave a cake to a little child, but
its mother would not allow it to be eaten until she was again and again
assured and reassured that it was quite fit to eat. This home life of
the very poor Chinese, if indeed it may be called home life, has a
listlessness about it in marked contrast to that of the West. There is
little housework, no furniture more than a table and chair or two, and
the simplicity of the cooking arrangements does not tend to increase the
work of the housewife.

People here to-day are going about their work with a restful
deliberation very trying to one in a hurry. The women, with infants tied
to their backs, do not work hard but very long. A mud-house is being
built near by, and between the cooking and attendi