of work as they must, eating,
drinking, squatting about round the hearth telling stories of their
valor with the cross-bow, and their excitement is provided by an
occasional expedition to get wood for their cross-bows and poison for
their arrows, or a stock of salt and wild honey.

Mr. Forrest, in his paper which was read before the Royal Geographical
Society in June, 1908, speaks of this wild honey as an agreeable
sweetmeat as a change, but that after a few days' constant partaking of
it the European palate rejects it as nauseous and almost disgusting, and
adds that it has escaped the Biblical commentators that one of the
principal hardships which John the Baptist must have undergone was his
diet of wild honey. In another part of his paper the writer says,
speaking of the cross-bow to which I have referred: "Every Li-su with
any pretensions to _chic_ possesses at least one of these weapons--one
for everyday use in hunting, the other for war. The children play with
miniature cross-bows. The men never leave their huts for any purpose
without their cross-bows, when they go to sleep the 'na-kung' is hung
over their heads, and when they die it is hung over their graves. The
largest cross-bows have a span of fully five feet, and require a pull of
thirty-five pounds to string them. The bow is made of a species of wild
mulberry, of great toughness and flexibility. The stock, some four feet
long in the war-bows, is usually of wild plum wood, the string is of
plaited hemp, and the trigger of bone. The arrow, of sixteen to eighteen
inches, is of split bamboo, about four times the thickness of an
ordinary knitting needle, hardened and pointed. The actual point is bare
for a quarter to one-third of an inch, then for fully an inch the arrow
is stripped to half its thickness, and on this portion the poison is
placed. The poison used is invariably a decoction expressed from the
tubers of a species of _aconitum_, which grows on those ranges at an
altitude of 8,000 to 10,000 feet ... The reduction in thickness of the
arrow where the poison is placed causes the point to break off in the
body of anyone whom it strikes, and as each carries enough poison to
kill a cart horse a wound is invariably fatal. Free and immediate
incision is the usual remedy when wounded on a limb or fleshy part of
the body."[BC]

Some time after I was traveling in these regions I made arrangements to
visit the mission station of the China Inland Mission, some da