It was a room, that is in so far as four sides, a floor and a ceiling comprise one.  Of that I had no doubt.  A sort of uncomely offshoot from the main inn building, built on piles in the earth after the fashion of the seashore houses of the Malay—­but much dirtier and incomparably more shaky.  For many a long year, longer than mine horrid host would care to recollect, this now unoccupied space had served admirably as the common cooking-room—­the ruined fireplace was still there; later, it had been the stable—­the ruined horse trough was still there.  At one extreme corner only could I stand upright; long sooty cobwebs graced the black wood beams overhead, hanging as thick as icicles in a mountain valley; each step I took in fear and trembling (the slightest move threatened to collapse the whole dilapidation).  Four planks, four inches wide at the widest part and of varying lengths and thicknesses, placed on a pile of loose firewood at the head and foot, comprised the bedstead on which I tremulously sat down.  Upon this improvised apology for a bed, under my mosquito curtains (no traveler should be without them in Western China), I washed my blistered feet on an ancient Daily Telegraph, whilst my cook saw to my evening meal.  His bringing in the rice tallied with my laying the tablecloth in the same place where I had washed my feet—­the one available spot.

As I ate, rats came brazenly and picked up the grains of rice I dropped in my inefficient handling of chopsticks, and in scaring off these hardened, hungry vermin I accidentally upset tea over my bed, whilst at the same moment a clod-hopping coolie came in with an elephant tread, with the result that my European reading-lamp lost its balance from the top of a tin of native sugar and started a conflagration, threatening to make short work of me and my belongings—­not to mention that horrid fellow and his inn.

During the night the moments throbbed away as I lay on my flea-ridden couch—­moments which seemed long as hours, and no gleaming rift broke the settled and deepening blackness of my hateful environs.  Every thing and every place was full of the wearisome, depressing, beauty-blasting commonplace of Interior China.  Stenches rose up on the damp, dank air, and throughout the night, through the opening of a window, I seemed to gaze out to a disconsolate eternity—­gaping, empty, unsightly.  Waking from my dozing at the hour when judgment sits upon the hearts of men, I sat in ponderous judgment upon all to whom the bungling of the previous day was due.  There were the rats and mice, and cats and owls, and creaks and cracks—­no quiet about the place from night to morning.  Then came the barking of dogs, the noises of the cocks and kine, of horses and foals, of pigs and geese—­the general wail of the zoological kingdom—­cows bellowing, duck diplomacy, and much else.  So that it were not surprising to learn that this distinguished traveler in these contemptible regions was sitting on a broken-down bridge, looking wearily on to the broken-down tower on the summit of a pretty little knoll outside Kungshan, thinking that it were well a score of such were added did their design embrace a warning to evade the place.