Having done some twenty li by moonlight, I managed with little difficulty to reach Yang-kai (6,350 feet) by 3.0 p.m.  This road, which is not the main road to the capital, was purposely chosen; most travelers go through Yang-lin.  The journey is comprised of pleasant ascents and descents over the latter portion of the great Yuen-nan Plateau, and a very appreciable difference in the temperature was here noticed.  While the people at the north-east of the province, from which I had come, were shivering in their rags and complaining about the price of charcoal, the population here basked under Italian skies in a warm sun.  From Lui-shu-ho (7,200 feet) the country was beautifully wooded with groves of firs and chestnuts.

At the inn to which I was led the phlegmatic proprietor, after wishing me peace, assumed unostentatiously the becoming attitude of a Customs official, and scrutinized with vigor the whole of my gear, from an empty Calvert’s tooth-powder tin to my Kodak camera, showering particularly condescending felicitations upon my English Barnsby saddle and field-glasses thereto attached.

His excitement rose at once.

He called loudly for his confederates—­a band of inelegant infidels—­and bidding them stand one by one at given distances, he gaped at them through the glasses with the hilarity of a schoolboy and the stupidity of an owl.  He jumped, he shouted, he waved his arms about me, and handing them back to me with both hands, shouted deafeningly in my ear that they were quite beyond his ken; and then he sucked his teeth disgustingly and spat at my feet.  His associates were speechless, asses that they were, and could only stare, in horror or impudence I know not.

Meantime Lao Chang brought tea, and sallied forth immediately to fraternize among old friends.  As I drank my tea, after having invited them one by one to join me, slowly and with a fitting dignity, the empty stare, destitute of sense or sincerity, of these six upstanding Chinese gentry, sucking at tobacco-pipes as long as their own overfed bodies, forced upon me a sense of my unfitness for the unknown conditions of the life of the place, a sense of loneliness and social unshelteredness in the sterile waste of their fashionable life.  They spoke to me subsequently, and I bravely threw at them a Chinese phrase or two; but when the conversation got above my head, I told them, quietly but determinedly, that I could not understand, my English speech seemed vaguely to indicate a sudden collapse of the acquaintance, the opening of a gulf between us, destined to widen to the whole length and breadth of Yang-kai, swallowing up their erstwhile confidences.  One of them facetiously remarked that the gentleman wished to eat his rice; and as they cleared out, falling over each other and the high step at the entrance to the room, I thought that no matter how old they are, Chinese are but little children.  But had I treated them as little children I should have found that they were old men.