The usual wooden bedstead stands in the corner of the room with the straw bedding (this, by the way, should on no account be removed if one wishes to sleep in peace), sometimes there is a table, sometimes a couple of chairs.  If these are steady it is lucky, if unbroken it is the exception; there are never more.  Over the bedstead (more often than not, by the way, it is composed of four planks of varying lengths and thickness, placed across two trestles) I used first to place my oilskin, then my p’u-k’ai, and that little creeper which rhymes with hug did not disturb me much.  Rats ran round and over me in profusion, and, of course, the best room being invariably nearest to the pigsties, there were the usual stenches.  The floor was Mother Earth, which in wet weather became mud, and quite a common thing it was for my joys to be enhanced during a heavy shower of rain by my having to sleep, almost suffocated, mackintosh over my head, owing to a slight break in the continuity of the roof—­my umbrella being unavailable, as one of my men dropped it over a precipice two days out.  For many reasons a camp-bed is to Europeans an indispensable part of even the most modest traveling equipment.  I was many times sorry that I had none with me.

The inns of Szech’wan, however, are by many degrees better than those of Yuen-nan, which are sometimes indescribable.  Earthen floors are saturated with damp filth and smelling decay; there are rarely the paper windows, but merely a sort of opening of woodwork, through which the offensive smells of decaying garbage and human filth waft in almost to choke one; tables collapse under the weight of one’s dinner; walls are always in decay and hang inwards threateningly; wicked insects, which crawl and jump and bite, creep over the side of one’s rice bowl—­and much else.  Who can describe it?  It makes one ill to think of it.

Throughout my journeyings it was necessary for my toileting, in fact, everything, to be performed in absolute unalloyed publicity.  Three days out my boy fixed up a cold bath for me, and barricaded a room which had a certain amount of privacy about it, owing to its secluded position; but even grown men and women, anxious to see what it was like when it had no clothes on, came forward, poked their fingers through the paper in the windows (of course, glass is hardly known in the interior), and greedily peeped in.  This and the profound curiosity the people evince in one’s every action and movement I found most trying.

It was my misfortune each day at this stage to come into a town or village where market was in progress.  Catching a sight of the foreign visage, people opened their eyes widely, turned from me, faced me again with a little less of fear, and then came to me, not in dozens, but in hundreds, with open arms.  They shouted and made signs, and walking excitedly by my side, they examined at will the texture of my clothes, and touched my boots with sticks to see whether the