water ready for the traveler, constantly re-filled by a woman whose child, hung over her back, moaned piteously for the milk its mother was too busy to give to it.  Near by a young girl gave suck to a deformed infant, lucky to have survived its birth; her neck was as big as her breasts—­merely a case of goitre.  Coolies passed, panting and puffing, all casting a curious glance at him to whose beneficence all were willing to pander.

At tiffin I counted thirty-three wretched people, who turned out to see the barbarian.  They desired, and desired importunately, to touch me and the clothes which covered me.  And I submitted.

This half-way place was interesting owing to the fact that the lady in charge of the buffet could speak two words of French—­she had, I believe, acted as washerwoman to a man who at one time had been in the Customs at Mengtsz.  Great excitement ensued among the perspiring laborers of the road and the dumb-struck yokels of the district.  The lady was so goitrous that it would have been extremely risky to hazard a guess as to the exact spot where her face began or ended; and here, in a place where with all her neighbors she had lived through a period noted for famine, for rebellion, for wholesale death and murder of an entire village, she endured such terrible poverty that one would have thought her spirit would have waned and the light of her youth burned out.  But no!  The lusty dame was still sprightly.  She had been three times divorced.  The person at present connected with her in the bonds of wedded life—­also goitrous and morally repulsive—­stood by and gazed down upon her like a proud bridegroom.  He resented the levity of Shanks and his companion, but, owing to the detail of a sightless eye, he could not see all that transpired.  However, we were all happy enough.  Charges were not excessive.  My men had a good feed of rice and cabbage, with the usual cabbage stump, two raw rice biscuits (which they threw into the ashes to cook, and when cooked picked the dirt off with their long finger-nails), and as much tea as they could drink—­all for less than a penny.

There is something in traveling in Yuen-nan, where the people away from the cities exhibit such painful apathy as to whether dissolution of this life comes to them soon or late, which breeds drowsiness.  After a tramp over mountains for five or six hours on end, one naturally needed rest.  To-day, as I sat after lunch and wrote up my journal, I nearly fell asleep.  As I watched the reflections of all these ill-clad figures on the stony roadway, and dozed meanwhile, one rude fellow asked my man whether I was drunk!

I was not left long to my reverie.