information that there was no picture. Photographing in cloudy
Szechuan has many drawbacks, and I was ready to bark with the proverbial
dog of the province when I saw the sun. The feeling of the Chinese
toward the camera seems to vary. Children were sometimes afraid. One boy
old enough to carry a heavy load, having been induced by the promise of
a reward to stand still, burst into tears just as I was about to snap
him, and I had to send him off triumphant over his bits of cash, while I
was left pictureless. Some, too, of the older people made objection,
while on the other hand I was occasionally asked to take a picture.

Toward noon we found ourselves again in the valley of the Ya, sometimes
following a well-paved trail above the river, the ups and downs
carefully terraced in broad stone steps, occasionally threading our way
among the huge rush mats with which the village streets were carpeted.
The harvesting of the millet and barley crops was over, and the sheaves
had been brought into the village to dry and were spread out in the only
level space available, the highway. Men walked over the sheaves,
children and dogs romped among them, and no one said them nay. Twice we
were ferried across the river, and finally a short run over the low,
wide reefs that here narrow the channel brought us to Ya-chou and to the
end of the Lesser Trail. We had made the trip without any of the
prophesied mishaps, and for me it was far more comfortable and more
interesting than following the main track. To be sure, we took five days
to it, but it would not have been difficult to have saved a day, only
there was no object in doing it, for a wait at Ya-chou was inevitable
that the ma-fu and pony might catch us up there.

My enforced stay of one day in Ya-chou gave me a chance to see something
of the town. I had the good fortune to be entertained by members of the
American Baptist Mission, Dr. and Mrs. Shields, and there as elsewhere I
found the missionaries most helpful in giving the traveller an insight
into local conditions. There is one limitation to this, however, in the
gulf which seems fixed between Protestants and Roman Catholics in the
East, cutting off the chance of learning what the latter are doing; and
when one bears in mind that Rome has had her missionaries in China for
three hundred years and numbers her converts by millions, one would like
to know more of the work done.

But there is no doubt as to the reality of Protestant a