n overcoat among the crowd drinking tea, whilst the soldiers
drank wine--they bought five cash worth. Had my lamp oil run out, I
should have bought liquor and tried to burn it instead. Soon the spirit
began to talk, and these braves of the Chinese army got on terms of
freest familiarity, telling me what an all-round excellent fellow I was,
and how pleased they were that I had to suffer as well as they. But they
never forgot themselves, and I allowed them to wander on uncontradicted
and unrestrained. After a weary night of tossing in my p'ukai, with a
roaring gale blowing through the latticed bamboo, behind which I lay so
poorly sheltered, we started in good spirits.

Twenty-five li farther we reached Kan-lan-chai (4,800 feet), February
9th, 1910, New Year's morning. Nothing could be bought. Everywhere the
people said, "Puh mai, puh mai," and although we had traveled the
twenty-five li over a terrible road, with a fearful gradient at the end,
we could not get anyone to make tea for us. It is distinctly against the
Chinese custom to sell anything at New Year time, of course. We had to
boil our own water and make our own tea. A larger crowd than usual
gathered around me because of the general holiday; and as I write now I
am seated in my folding-chair with all the reprobates near to me--men
gazing emptily, women who have rushed from their houses combing their
hair and nursing their babies, the beggars with their poles and bowls,
numberless urchins, all open-mouthed and curious. These are kept from
crowding over me by the two soldiers, who the day before had come on
ahead to book rooms in the place. I stayed at Kan-lan-chai on another
occasion. Then I found a good room, but later learned that it was a
horse inn, the yard of which was taken up by fifty-nine pack animals
with their loads. Pegs were as usual driven into the ground in parallel
rows, a pair of ponies being tied to each--not by the head, but by the
feet, a nine-inch length of rope being attached to the off foreleg of
one and the near foreleg of the other, the animals facing each other in
rows, and eating from a common supply in the center. Everyone in the
small town was busy doing and driving, very anxious that I should be
made comfortable, which might have been the case but for some untiring
musician who was traveling with the caravan, and seemed to be one of
that species of humankind who never sleeps. His notes, however, were
fairly in harmony, but when it runs