“The delicate fragrance (of the roses and honeysuckle), alas! cannot overpower the appalling odours which here and there assail us, poisoning the freshness of the evening breezes.

“These are wafted from the Baby Towers, two of which we had to pass.  These are square towers, with small windows, about twelve feet from the ground, somewhat resembling pigeon-towers; these strange dove-cotes are built to receive the bodies of such babies as die too young to have fully developed souls, and therefore there is no necessity to waste coffins on them, or even to take the trouble of burying them in the bosom of mother earth.  So the insignificant little corpse is handed over to a coolie, who, for the sum of forty cash, equal to about five cents, carries it away, ostensibly to throw it into one of these towers; but if he should not choose to go so far, he gets rid of it somehow,—­no questions are asked, and there are plenty of prowling dogs ever on the watch seeking what they may devour.  To-day several poor uncoffined mites were lying outside the towers, shrouded only in a morsel of old matting—­apparently they had been brought by some one who had failed to throw them in at the window (’about twelve feet from the ground’), in which, by the way, one had stuck fast!

“Some of these poor little creatures are brought here alive and left to die, and some of these have been rescued and carried to foundling hospitals.  The neighbourhood was so pestiferous that we could only pause a moment to look at ‘an institution’ which, although so horrible, is so characteristic of this race, who pay such unbounded reverence to the powerful dead who could harm them.  Most of the bodies deposited here are those of girl babies who have been intentionally put to death, but older children are often thrown in.”

With regard to this, I will only say that I lived all together for over four years within a mile or so of these Towers, which I frequently passed during the evening walk; and so far from ever seeing “several poor uncoffined mites lying outside the towers, shrouded only in a morsel of old matting,” which Miss Gordon Cumming has described, I never even saw one single instance of a tower being put to the purpose for which it was built, viz.:  as a burying-place for the dead infants of people too poor to spend money upon a grave.  As for living children being thrown in, I think I shall be able to dispose of that statement a little later on.  Miss Gordon Cumming did not add that these towers are cleared out at regular intervals by a Chinese charitable society which exists for that purpose, the bodies burnt, and the ashes reverently buried.

Mrs. Bird-Bishop, the traveller, is reported to have stated at a public lecture in 1897, that “one of the most distressing features of Chinese life was the contempt for women.  Of eleven Bible-women whom she had seen at a meeting in China, there was not one who had not put an end to at least five girl-babies.”