and slightly clad in garments of cotton cloth; these were rosy as children and fat as pigs:  they were besides wrapped up in four or five pelisses, worn one over the other, lined with sheepskins, so that a single man smelt like a whole flock of sheep.  Their style of dress was this:  half a dozen waistcoats without sleeves, covered with a single overcoat with extremely long sleeves, falling down to their knees.  These garments made them resemble balls of wool rather than men.

By accident, the party passed first through the quarter of the town devoted to the restaurants.  Here they were for every grade of fortune, from the millionaire to the ragged poor.  The street filled with these latter was terrible:  it swarmed with thousands of beggars, hardly human in form and almost naked, though there was frozen snow upon the ground.  A group, seeming even joyous, attracted attention.  The cause of their happiness was a dead dog which they had found in one of the gutters.  Even, however, in this degradation the politeness of these people struck our Frenchmen forcibly.  The guests gathered about this fortuitous repast treated each other with a ceremonious deference strange enough in such surroundings.  In a still lower stratum, however, among even a more degraded class, whose feasts were obtained from the live preserves carried upon their own persons, this politeness, the last quality a Chinaman loses from the degradation of poverty, was wanting.

A few miles from Shanghai lies Zi-Ka-Wai, a colony founded by the Jesuits, of which our traveler gives a most interesting account.  The road to Zi-Ka-Wai lay over a sandy plain intersected with canals.  On both sides of the road were hundreds of coffins resting upon the surface of the ground.  In the northern part of China there are no grave-yards, and the coffins were arranged sometimes in piles in the fields.  It is said that they thus remain until a change takes place in the reigning dynasty, when they are all destroyed.  As the present dynasty has reigned about three hundred years, the accumulation may be imagined.  This traditional respect for the inviolability of the dead is one of the chief obstacles in the way of the introduction of the telegraph and railroad in China.  A commercial house in Shanghai had built a telegraph to Wo-Soung to announce the arrival of the mail, but in a few days the wire was cut in more than five hundred places—­at all the points where its shadow from the rising sun fell upon the coffins lying on the ground.

At Zi-Ka-Wai the Jesuits have an educational institution, and, dressed in the Chinese costume, smoking the long native pipes, received their visitors with great cordiality.  Their pupils are divided into three classes.  The first consists of the children of the neighboring towns who have been deserted by their parents and left to die of hunger.  The majority of them are lepers, and have been more or less perfectly cured by the Fathers.  When brought to the institution they are thoroughly cleaned, being rubbed with pumice stone.  They receive an industrial as well as a literary education.  In one building they are taught to read and write, and in another are the schools for shoemaking, carpentering, printing and other manual arts; so that, being received at the age of five or six, at twenty to twenty-one they are launched upon the world with an education and a trade.