human ear.  They occupy themselves in working in wood, gold, silver, and precious stones, but a small proportion are tillers of the soil.  They wear clothes of a red colour.  The sexes are distinguishable by a slight beard on the men, and long tresses on the women, the latter in some cases reaching four to five inches in length.  Their heads are unduly large, being quite out of proportion to their small bodies.  A husband and wife usually go about hand in hand.  A Hakka charcoal-burner once found three of the children playing in his tobacco-box.  He kept them there, and afterward, when he was showing them to a friend, he laughed so that drops of saliva flew from his mouth and shot two of them dead.  He then begged his friend to take the third and put it in a place of safety before he should laugh again.  His friend attempted to lift it from the box, but it died on being touched.

The Giants

In the Country of the Giants the people are fifty feet in height.  Their footprints are six feet in length.  Their teeth are like those of a saw.  Their finger-nails present the appearance of hooked claws, while their diet consists wholly of uncooked animal food.  Their eyebrows are of such length as to protrude from the front of the carts in which they ride, large though it is necessary for these vehicles to be.  Their bodies are covered with long black hair resembling that of the bear.  They live to the advanced age of eighteen thousand years.  Though cannibals, they never eat members of their own tribe, confining their indulgence in human flesh chiefly to enemies taken in battle.  Their country extends some thousands of miles along certain mountain ranges in North-eastern Asia, in the passes of which they have strong iron gates, easy to close, but difficult to open; hence, though their neighbours maintain large standing armies, they have thus far never been conquered.

The Headless People

The Headless People inhabit the Long Sheep range, to which their ancestors were banished in the remote past for an offence against the gods.  One of the said ancestors had entered into a controversy with the rulers of the heavens, and they in their anger had transformed his two breasts into eyes and his navel into a mouth, removed his head, leaving him without nose and ears, thus cutting him off from smell and sound, and banished him to the Long Sheep Mountains, where with a shield and axe, the only weapons vouchsafed to the people of the Headless Country, he and his posterity were compelled to defend themselves from their enemies and provide their subsistence.  This, however, does not in the least seem to have affected their tempers, as their bodies are wreathed in perpetual smiles, except when they flourish their warlike weapons on the approach of an enemy.  They are not without understanding, because, according to Chinese notions of physiology, “their bellies are full of wisdom.”