Ch’u-tung is a Mohammedan town.  There are a few Chinese only—­Buddhists, Taoists and other ragtags; although when the follower of the Prophet has his pigtail attached to the inside of his hat, as it not unusual when he goes out fully dressed, there is little difference between him and the Chinese.

Pigs here are conspicuously absent.  People feed on poultry and beef.  I rested in this city some month or so after my first overland trip whilst my man went to convert silver into cash, a trying ordeal always.  Whilst I sipped my tea and ate a couple of rice cakes, I was impressed, as I seldom have been in my wanderings, with the remarkable number of people, from the six hundred odd houses the town possesses, who during that half-hour found nothing whatever to do to benefit themselves or the community, as members of which they passed monotonous lives, but to stare aimlessly at the resting foreigner.  The report spread like wildfire, and they ran to the scene with haste, pulling on their coats, wiping food from their mouths, scratching their heads en route, one trouser-leg up and the other down, all anxious to get a seat near the stage.  A river flows down the center of the street, and into this a sleepy fellow got tipped bodily in the crush, sat down in the water, seemingly in no hurry to move until he had finished his vigorous bullying of the man who pushed him in.  Those who could not get standing room near my table went out into the street and shaded the sun from their eyes, in order that they might catch even a glimpse of the traveler who sat on in uncompromising indifference.

Several old wags were there who had witnessed the Rebellion—­at the moment, had I not become callous, another might have seemed imminent—­and were looked up to by the crowd as heroes of a horrid past, being listened to with rapt attention as they described what it was the crowd looked at and whence it came.  Had I been a wild animal let loose from its cage, mingled curiosity and a peculiar foreboding among the people of something terrible about to happen could not have been more intense.

But I had by this time got used to their crowding, so that I could write, sleep, eat, drink, and be merry, and go through personal and private routine with no embarrassment.  If I turned for the purpose, I could easily stare out of face a member of the crowd whose inquisitive propensities had become annoying, but as soon as he left another filled the gap.  Quite pitiful was it to see how trivial articles of foreign manufacture—­such, for instance, as the cover of an ordinary tin or the fabric of one’s clothing—­brought a regular deluge of childish interest and inane questioning; and if I happened to make a few shorthand notes upon anything making a particular impression, a look half surprised, half amused, went from one to another like an electric current.  Had I been scheming out celestial hieroglyphics their mouths could not have opened wider.  As I write now I am asked by a respectable person how many ounces of silver a Johann Faber’s B.B. costs.  I have told him, and he has retired smiling, evidently thinking that I am romancing.