walls draped with green creepers. Entering through a fine
stone gateway, we found ourselves in the single street, broad, well
paved, and wonderfully clean. The inhabitants were apparently well used
to foreigners, which is natural, as Ya-chou with its Roman Catholic and
Protestant missions is only twenty miles away.

The country through which we passed the next day was very varied, and
always beautiful. On leaving the town the path led along a low ridge
given over to graves. Living and dead dwell side by side in China, and
often it seems as though the rights of the one were sacrificed to the
claims of the other. The Chinese saying, "For every man that Heaven
creates, Earth provides a grave," takes on a new significance as one
looks over the land, the dead are so many, the living so hard put to
live. This was not an unattractive place, for the mounds of earth and
stone were overgrown with grass and ferns, while many were decorated
with a tuft of bamboo or a bush of wild roses. The free use of stone in
this district was very striking; pavements, often in good condition,
were general, the irrigating ditches were bridged by a single slab of
the red sandstone of Szechuan, perhaps ten feet in length, while at
every turn there were charming little stone shrines in place of the
shabby wooden ones found farther south.

After a bit we turned away from the plain and river and entered a more
broken country, hills and valleys, ridges and dells, rushing brooks
between banks of ferns, little tumbling cascades over mossy stones,
groups and avenues of fine trees, picturesque stone bridges, everywhere
painstaking tillage and ingenious irrigation. It was all charming, with
the artificial beauty of a carefully ordered park. Resting in my chair
in front of a tea-house where the coolies were refreshing themselves, I
noticed my knight of the bridges suddenly throw himself on the ground
before the interpreter, crying out something in beseeching tones, while
the other coolies standing about laughed unsympathetically. The poor man
was urging the interpreter to ask that I give him back his soul, of
which apparently I had deprived him when I took his picture an hour
back. Without his soul he would die, and then what would his mother, a
widow, do? After some talk he was consoled, the other men assuring him
that they had been photographed over and over again without suffering
harm. If only I had known at the time, I could have consoled him with
the