The stories I heard about the Chinese town gave me quite a feeling of excitement the first time I went into it. People threatened me with horrible sights, and still more horrible smells. But I fancy those, who talk in this way, can know very little of the East End of London, and nothing of the South of France or Italian towns. Hankow certainly struck me as very fairly clean, considering how crowded its streets are, and the people at that time for the most part as wonderfully civil. I should not care to hear the shower of abuse, that would greet a foreigner in one of our English towns, who turned over and examined all the articles on a stall, then went away without buying anything, as English people do not hesitate to do there. The Kiangsi and Hunan Guild-houses are both well worth a visit, although the former has been in large measure burnt down, and thus stripped of those wonderful coloured tiles about which the few, who have seen them, are still enthusiastic. Most people have never seen them at all. As it is now, the temple to the god of literature at Hanyang has more charms for me, with its many curved roofs making such an harmonious, rich, dark medley. However, of course in Hankow no one in the month of May is thinking about architecture. "Thou art not science, but thou tea-chest art" is the riddle they were all engaged with, and they were very sad over it. For the tea was bad; and though the Chinamen had bound themselves under awful penalties to have no second crop, yet of course the second crop would be there soon. I looked sadly at the men from Hunan, sitting so truculently in their boats, with their pigtails twice coiled round their heads, counting over beforehand the gains they meant to take back home; for probably there would be none. We talked tea at breakfast and tiffin and dinner, and we took it at five and considered its quality. But that would not make the people at home give up Indian tea, with all its tannin and nerve-poisoning qualities. So in between-whiles we counted up how many suicides there were last tea-season. For Chinese have a fine sense of honesty, if not of honour; and merchants are apt to kill themselves, if they cannot meet their obligations. "There will be more suicides this year," said first one, then another.

Meanwhile, the pretty painted boxes streamed past the house at the rate of eighty a minute sometimes—always noiselessly carried by coolies in huge sun-hats, and too often through the dripping rain. And the great gamble went on, and the men who dropped in to call looked wearier and wearier. But that was all in 1887, which might almost be called the last year of the great China tea trade of which Hankow had since 1861 been the centre. There was quite a fleet of ocean steamers there even that year to take the tea away; in 1898, barely one for London. English people will not drink China tea. It is so delicate that, though in itself inexpensive, it comes dear from more leaf having to be used to produce the same strength of liquor. But it is soothing, whilst Indian tea puts a fresh strain upon our already overtaxed digestions.

In old days the Hankow tea trade was a great business. Tea-tasters came out from England in crowds, arriving in May and going away in July. They would taste two hundred different teas, not swallowing the tea, but just savouring its flavour, and smelling it, and handling the leaf. Then the man who could not tell the same tea again when he went over the two hundred the second time was no tea-taster. They were pale men for the most part, of rather finely strung susceptibilities, or their palates would not have been so critical. And they did not care much for games of chance, they gambled so high in tea, a fortnight's business easily leading a man to win or lose £20,000.

Ah! the good old days of China tea and silk are gone. Are there better days yet to come in the new China that is to take the place of old China, which is passing away even as we talk about it?

III. Inside a Chinese City.

One of the most exciting moments of all my life in China was when I first found myself shut up within the walls and barred gates of Wuchang, the provincial capital of Hupeh, one of the rowdiest provinces of China. And of the three cities that meet together and almost join—Hankow and Wuchang being separated by the there three-quarter-mile wide Yangtse, and Hankow and Hanyang separated by the boat-covered Han—Wuchang has the reputation of being the most rowdy. It is there, of course, the Provincial Examinations are held; and when men assemble in their thousands away from their families and friends, they are in all countries apt to be unruly.

Probably, of all the hundreds of foreign tea-men who visited Hankow, barely one or two had been across the river to Wuchang. But a missionary, who was living alone there, and seemed to feel his loneliness, asked us to go over and spend the night with him; and with many doubts as to what kind of accommodation he could give us, and whether we should be inconveniencing him, we accepted. I have often been to Wuchang since then. But I remember still the thrill with which, when I went to bed that night, I stood at the window and listened to the strange, unfamiliar sounds from the street beyond the compound, or garden. There was the night-watchman crying the hours, and clacking his pieces of bamboo together to warn evil-doers to keep off. But he did it in a way I had not yet heard. Then there were such curious long drawn-out street cries, all unknown, and sounds of people calling to one another, and the buzz of a great city. And I suddenly realised, with a choking sense of emotion, that the gates were shut, and I was within there with a whole cityful of Chinese so hostile to foreigners, and especially to foreign women, that it had not been thought safe to let me walk through them to the missionary's house. Even the curtain of my sedan-chair had been drawn down, so that I might not be seen by any one.

Wuchang has always been specially interesting to me, because it was my first Chinese city. And it is so characteristic a one. Every Chinese city is supposed to be placed on hills representing a serpent and a tortoise, although the likeness has often to be helped out by a temple on the tortoise's head, or a pagoda to connect the serpent's coils. But at Wuchang the serpent and tortoise are very plainly visible. Then all Chinese cities are apt to be rude. But the people at Wuchang are so particularly rude. How often have not the gentlemen accompanying me, when in subsequent years I have dared to walk through its streets, had to separate themselves from me, and to walk backwards, exhorting the oncoming crowd of roughs to propriety of behaviour! Curiously enough, the roughest of Chinese roughs get red and uncomfortable, when you tell them you fear they have never learnt politeness, do not observe the rules of decorum, etc., etc. I learnt it as a patter simply from hearing it said in my own defence, and have often raised a blush since then by saying it myself. I doubt if the same results would be obtained by ever so eloquent a paraphrase of the fourth commandment down Whitechapel way. But Chinese, whether they follow them or not, seem all to have been taught to hold in respect the dicta of the ancients. To this day a quotation from Confucius will often settle a moot point in weighty affairs of State. Would that it were so among ourselves with a Christian text!

IV. Shanghai Public Gardens.

To those who have just arrived off a long sea voyage, as to those who from time to time come down from some roadless, gasless, shopless, but smell-ful up-country sojourn, there is one bit of Shanghai that is exceptionally refreshing and delightsome; and that is the garden by the river. At night, when the lamps are lit and mirrored in the water in rows and garlands of light, when the sea-breeze blows in freshly, and friends gather in the gardens, I have even heard it asserted by its greatest detractors, "Shanghai is as good as any other place by night."

Hongkong Gardens are very fair to see, resembling those of Babylon in being hanging gardens, gardens of terraces. But the way in which the Shanghai Gardens are fitted in between the Bund and the Soochow Creek, with the much-traversed Garden Bridge giving something definite to look at, and the river girdling it all—the river with its ever-moving panorama of swift ocean steamers and perky little steam-launches, and yachts and junks of deeply dyed sails, and brilliant coloured sanpans, all within a stone's-throw,—this situation makes the Shanghai Gardens a place not easily to be matched for passing away the after-sunshine hours. But flowers are the Shanghai Gardens' forte. They should be seen when they are all abloom with roses; or when lordly tulips dazzle the eye with their scarlet and gold, till it is fain to seek relief among those blue and white fairies dancing in the sunshine—sweet-scented hyacinths; or when the chrysanthemums are in season. All these flowers are seen against a background of glossy-leaved magnolias, with their pale sweet-scented blossoms, and oleander-trees, and pomegranates and acacias, all in their different seasons glorious with rose and scarlet or feathery pink and white blossoms.

At one season there is a borderful, but full to overflowing, as those borders almost always are, of the Japanese Lilium auratum, a large, almost arrogant, white lily, with a broad band of gold down each petal. A little while before, people went to the far garden across the road to see the fly-devouring flower, and inhale its fetid breath as of dead men's—not bones, certainly—and all uncleanness. Next the water-lilies claimed their attention, and the poetic rosy lotus flowers, one of which grew so fast, and with such precision of rectitude, that its bud forced its way right through the overshadowing fleshy leaf, and there expanded into a beautiful blossom at its leisure.

The rarely visited fernery at the end of this garden well deserves more frequent visits. There you will find that quaint Asplenium bulbiferum, that drops off little plants, that happen to be growing about its leaves like little accidents, and eventually develop into big plants, that again do likewise. There are also fine specimens of the Australian Platycerium, which you do not wonder to find called grande, so solid and woolly-feeling are its great lumps of leaf. That brown irregular mark underneath one of the abruptly broken-off leaves is not decay, but spores of seed. This, with the name of Alicorne, something like an inverted porcupine, reaching out all round hands, some with three fingers, some with six, sometimes with the fingers tipped underneath with seed, sometimes not, is said to have arrived looking for all the world like a withered cabbage. Then it sprouted and burgeoned; and now it is a thing of joy for ever, not to be in the least dwarfed or put into the shade by Australian tree-ferns of really treelike proportions growing close alongside.

But the fernery has nothing of the charm for me possessed by the large conservatory. There, after so many years, I met once again the friends of my childhood.

And there, when first I saw it, were all the many varieties of fancy geraniums, so seldom seen in England now, together with heliotropes, and begonias, and rosellias, and cinerarias, all growing in loveliest confusion, though not as I remember them, weighing each other down with their prodigal luxuriance in a garden border, in far-away Madeira, but intermixed with Chinese rockwork and ferns, and generally massed so as to show themselves off to the greatest advantage. In August that house is full of velvety gloxinias of richest hues, and again mixed with waxen begonias. Outside the conservatory are two of those very quaint Singapore cup-sponges, serving as flower-pots of Nature's making. And near by, apparently the pride of the gardener, to judge by its lavish supply of netting, is an apple-tree, with many apples peeping from underneath the netting, as yet quite green! But for all their greenness, one has been carried off by the birds already. Hence the netting.

But it is in the garden beside the river where the pleasantest sitting and sauntering is done. No one puts on best clothes to go there in the morning; only people who like to go are to be met there—none from a sense of duty. There the nurses love to congregate whilst their children play together, and add much life and animation to the scene. The nurses introduce a Chinese element; for otherwise Chinese, were it even Li Hung-chang himself, are excluded from the gardens, as now from Australia, solely because they are Chinese. This never can seem quite right. The Japanese nurses add an additional element of picturesqueness, with their dark-coloured, clinging kimonos, and curious gait, as do also Parsee merchants with their high, hard hats.

Yet sometimes I have regretted we do not have more of the flowers of China in Shanghai. What lovely bursts of blossom one sees at times in the interior of China! One February I wrote from Chungking:

"Camellias of infinite variety are to be seen already. It is surprising to notice how many different kinds there are. Perhaps the loveliest is more like a blush-rose than a camellia—delicate coral pink, shading off into white round the edges of the somewhat crumpled petals. Since the Chinese seem now to devote no care to them, nor at all to know how many varieties there are, it is puzzling to think how they arose."

"The thermometer is now in the sixties. Our plum-trees done flowering; orchids coming on victoriously; tree-tulips and magnolias like big bouquets; and camellias only slowly waning. Probably nowhere could camellias be seen in greater luxuriance than here, where there are endless varieties; and a blossom of a peony-camellia, loose-petalled and very double, on being measured the other day, revealed a circumference of fifteen and a quarter inches. Great branches of judas-tree and pink peach blossom adorn our rooms, together with a bright-yellow flower that grows in great profusion, and that used to be called New Zealand flax. From all this you can fancy how hothouselike our atmosphere feels just now."

Later in the summer the peonies are the great pride of the Chinese; whilst the scarlet dragon-boat flower is, perhaps, the most remarkable of all the Chinese flowers from being all scarlet together. But it is useless to try to enumerate; for the highest authority in Kew Gardens told me once that in no part of the world was there a more abundant and varied flora than in the Ichang Gorges, which are also the land of the butterfly. It is, however, a mistake, I believe, to think China is called the flowery land from the number of its flowers, the Chinese word translated "flowery" meaning also "varicoloured."

V. In the Romantic East at Last!

Mr. Tee San's garden is one of the most fascinating spots in China, with the bright autumn sunshine glinting through the pretty bits of trellis-work on to its fantastic rocks, and zigzag bridges, and pretty pavilions, and lighting up the truly exquisite specimens of chrysanthemums sometimes on show there. There is the spiky little chrysanthemum, the tiger's moustache, and huge maroon blossoms fading off into delicate cream in the centre, and many other uncommon varieties, each in its appropriate pot, spacious, four-square, and creamy, apparently just made to be painted, and each placed at exactly the right elevation by means of its light wooden stand, sometimes raising the pot an inch or two, sometimes about eight feet, and always so slanted, that the flowers are tilted down towards the spectator, thus showing themselves off in their entirety. But it is not so much worth while to go to this garden in order to see the chrysanthemum, as to admire the infinite variety of Chinese decoration crowded into what is really a very confined space, but which is made to appear a garden large enough to lose oneself in. Rows of bamboo stems of soft blue-green china relieve the monotony of the walls, with their open air-spaces in between, as do also various graceful interlacings of tiles. There are doors of all sorts and sizes, like a horseshoe, like a pentagon, like a leaf cut somewhat irregularly down the middle by the leaf stem, and with outer edge fluted like a leaf. There are, of course, artificial mounds made out of rockwork, and grottoes, and quaint lumps of stone, looking as if they had been masses of molten metal suddenly hardened in their grotesqueness; also, as a matter of course, inside the pavilions there are various specimens of that landscape stone—dear to the heart of the Chinaman, and said to come from Yunnan—framed and hanging on the walls. There used to be also a magnificent peacock; a mandarin duck, with its quaint, bright, decisive colouring; golden pheasants; a scarlet-faced monkey, and a pale-faced; a little company of white geese, and another of white rabbits. But to enumerate the treasures of the garden gives no idea of the artistic skill with which it has been laid out; so that every one who sits down in it even in the most commonplace manner, and even those most unpicturesque of human beings, Chinese men and women, immediately becomes an integral part of a picture.

There sit two Chinamen, with dark-purple silk outer jackets and long, glowing blue undergowns. They sit on each side of a little square black table, with their long pipes; behind them the sun slants across the latticed paper window, a branch of Virginia creeper, already yellow, pushing in through it. It needs not the addition of the cream-coloured pot with its chrysanthemums planted well to the front of it, as they all are, and on the usual slant. Without that bit of autumn colouring behind them, there is already an autumn picture,—men past their prime soothing the evening of their day in life with the pipe, all nature attuned with its vivid fast-fleeting sunshine and its orange-yellow leaves. In another pavilion sits one of those gorgeous creatures who always recall the braveries of Sir Walter Scott's descriptions, but who are hardly now to be seen out of China: his big loose jacket, of brocaded golden satin, stiff and shimmering: his long gown, only less brilliant, of violet satin. A gnarled and knotted root served there as stand for a flower-pot, artificial streamlets meandering round the pavilion. In the pavement was a stork in white, all formed of little broken bits of tile. The lights and shades were so entrancing, it was difficult to think of ever doing anything in these picturesque retreats, which immediately suggest the Chinaman's ideal—elegant leisure—and furnish most pleasant places to sit and meditate, as one might say, but in reality probably idly to watch the sunlight glorify this tint and soften that.

Without the sunshine it is a different affair. The patterns in the walls, in the fine pebble pavement, are still as complex, the triangles in the latter still as cunningly arranged, the doorways as surprising. There are still the same China drums of soft blue-green and green-blue for garden-seats, and great egg-green vessels for rain-water, as they say "very clear." But it all looks like a theatrical stage by daylight. Even the row of changeable roses by the water, which is really not so clear as it might be, looks uncomfortably pink beneath a grey rain-sky. Only the hoarfrost-resisting flower, as the Chinese call the chrysanthemum, is undimmed, the Chinamen's coats as gay. Whilst Chinese ladies totter as gracefully—or ungracefully—as before, with highly painted cheeks, gay garments, long elaborate earrings, beringed and bebraceleted with soft pure gold unalloyed.

When we were last there, a dainty-looking Chinese dinner was laid out in one of the pavilions; and before the guests sat down, girls arrived to make merry with music. For studying Chinese manners and customs, there could hardly be a more convenient place. Every one seemed very smart and very friendlily disposed towards the foreigner. Those who care for local colour can find it in this garden quite as well as in the China town; and, after all, when one can find local colour without local odours, it is a thing to make note of in China. It is true to get there one must not only drive down the Fukien Road, with its quaint dyers' drying-sheds high up against the sky, their blue draperies streaming from them picturesquely, then across that very fascinating bridge choked underneath with highly polished boats, piled with all manner of merchandise, but also, alas! through a local Covent Garden, full of colour enough, like its prototype in London, but, like that, not smell-less. Once arrived, however, a bewildering sense comes over one of having left prosaic Shanghai very far away, and of having at last arrived at a bit of the romantic East!

CHAPTER I.
ON THE UPPER YANGTSE.

Of all ways of travel, surely boat-travel is the most luxurious. For one thing, it is accounted roughing it; and that means that there is no bother about toilets: the easiest boots and gloves, the warmest and most comfortable of clothes, are the appropriate wear. But that seems to be the whole of the roughing of it. For naturally each boat-traveller takes care to start with a favourite chair and a comfortable bed; and it is his cook's business to provide the most recherché of little repasts whenever wanted. What else is he there for? Nor do soufflés and pheasants taste any the worse because the supply of fresh air is unlimited, and the cabin as cosy as nothing but a perfectly well-built house, or a boat floating in water warmer than the surrounding air, can be. The first time we went up to Chungking, we had a sleeping-cabin and sitting-cabin, each 9 ft. 4 in. by 7 ft. 7 in., the former well warmed by a most conveniently arranged kitchen adjoining, with a plentiful supply of warm water for our travelling-bath. Thus our only drawback was that the wind was always favourable; and whereas our captain had been bound over to pay us six shillings a day for every day over the agreed-upon twenty-two between Ichang and Chungking, we were equally bound to pay him six shillings a day extra for every day under.

"It depends, I suppose, a good deal upon how much people like or dislike the journey, whether it is worth while to come half round the world, and then steam a thousand nautical miles into the interior of China, in order to visit the Gorges of the Yangtse; but we have just returned from a five-days' trip, and what I have seen far surpasses my anticipations. Indeed, in all my travels, I know no country more altogether delightful. Although it is June, one of the worst seasons for going there, we have been able to walk about all day long, and without getting tired too. The air felt fresh, and, oh! so fragrant with delicious flowers. The feature of the region, of course, is the precipices. I should guess the precipices at nothing under two thousand feet, and perhaps not more than that sheer down, as far as I have seen: sometimes dolomitic white limestone, which always reminds me of dead men's bones, sometimes weathered a rich yellow-brown. The grandeur and massiveness of the bastions, and towers of rock, and overhanging pinnacles, and projecting isolated blocks, or pillars, standing bolt upright in fine relief against the sky, are not picturesque like the scenery round Méran, not exciting like some of the Alpine scenery in Switzerland, but awe-inspiring and sublime.

"Then the vegetation is enchanting. Nearly every flower, great big glorious butterfly, and brilliantly coloured bird is unknown to me; and till people have walked through a country where this is the case, they cannot imagine what a zest it adds to an expedition. But just to tell of those I recognise will show how charming it is. Fancy bamboos in feathery tufts, and palms, everywhere, not tall, but very graceful; chestnut-trees in full flower; plums laden with the rosiest fruit—but very bitter we found them; walnut-trees with huge leaves and nuts; orange-trees; most beautiful, perhaps, of all, the tallow-tree, rather like the lilac in leaf, but each leaf set on a very long stalk, so that the slightest breath sets it quivering, a light bright green in colour, each shoot tipped at the end with almost scarlet young leaves, and the whole tree, a tall well-grown tree too, covered with yellowish tassel-like flowers. Most lovely is the general effect. And in the autumn, they tell me, it is even finer, taking the same brilliant tints as the maple in Canada. I never know if I like this tree or the soap-tree best. The latter is like an oak in general effect, but more graceful, and grows quite big. But I am keeping the best to the last. Fancy blue larkspurs, and yellow jasmine, and glorious coloured oleanders, and begonias, virgin lilies, and yet taller white lilies, and gardenias, and sunflowers, all growing wild, and most luxuriantly. I was quite excited when I first saw waxen-leaved begonias cuddling into the crevices of a rock by the wayside; and exclaimed aloud when a turn of the path revealed a whole bank of dwarf sunflowers, golden in the sun. These, too, are only the flowers I can name. There are numbers more, and so fragrant! And among them all enormous swallow-tailed butterflies, and a very pretty breed of white goats, with dear little kids, disport themselves. Grand though the Gorges are, one does not feel saddened or depressed by them, as I was afraid of being. It is like seeing a whole troop of graceful loving grandchildren climbing up some grand old man's knee.

"But the Yangtse certainly does appear a very wicked river, bristling with rocks and whirlpools, just as its shores bristle with precipices. We had a very light boat, and an absurdly large crew—eight men besides the head man. And with all their exertions, they could only get us up against the rushing, whirling current at the rate of a mile an hour. But the river ran so fast, and the men worked so hard, and the shores were so varied, ever opening out some new, narrow defile, down which a torrent had cut its way—always cut quite deep—that one had no sense at all of going slowly, but just the contrary. The men had long bamboos with hooks at the end, and with these they would hook on to the rocks, and claw us up against the current; for we always kept quite close to the side, so as, as far as possible, to keep out of the rush of the river, and profit by occasional eddies. Then at other times they would bound on to the shore, scampering and giving tongue like a pack of beagles let loose, and tow the boat along, occasionally bending almost double in their efforts.

"I thought at first I would walk along the path with the trackers. Oh the foolish English idea! At times the trackers bounded along over loose boulders, or over ledges of rock, where the limestone strata made a fairly smooth surface; but at others they, with their bare feet and hands well used, had all they could do to find a footing. During these mauvais pas, or when they were ferried across in a boat, or waded through the river, those left on board would claw the rocks, or work the yulohs, very long and rather unmanageable oars. The oddest thing was the intense delight the men seemed to take in their work. But, of course, tracking our light boat was a very different thing from dragging a heavily laden junk. Hundreds of men are said to be lost in these rapids every year. And it really seems too dangerous work to put men to year in year out. Think of the tow-line breaking! During the little time we have been away, we saw one junk wrecked, and two drifting down-stream unmanageable, their tow-lines having broken, and nearly all their men being ashore. And the farthest point we got to was only fifteen miles from Ichang; so we got back down-stream in two hours. We did not go farther, because our captain said it was just then too dangerous to take our house-boat past the three terrible whirlpools of Nantor; and, of course, half the pleasure of the trip was in landing every now and then, and walking up the wild, narrow glens to different points of view. One day we walked from ten to seven to the Terrace of the Sun, where there is a small Taoist temple on a little ledge of rock just big enough to hold it, at the top of a mountain quite two thousand feet high, and with a sheer precipice on one side. Another day we walked from half-past six till half-past five to the Gold Diamond Mountain, where there is a Buddhist temple on a slightly larger plateau, with a spring on the top of the mountain, and a wonderful panoramic view. It is over a thousand feet higher than the other, and to get to it you walk along a quite narrow path with precipices on both sides. Do you realise that in China there are no railings and no roads, nothing but narrow paths like English field-paths? I never really believed it till I came here. And the agriculturists are always encroaching upon even the narrow paths there are, planting Indian corn and a few beans or something, on the chance that the passer-by will not tread upon them.

"The people are greatly interested in seeing a European woman. The women flock round, and beg me to take off my gloves and my hat, that they may see how my hair is done, and the colour of my hands. Then some old woman is sure to squeeze my feet, to see if there is really a foot filling up all those big boots: for, of course, all the women here have small feet—that is, they have them bandaged up; and astonishingly well they get along upon their hoof-like feet. They are very friendly, and bring out chairs and benches before their cottage doors, and beg us to sit down, and offer us tea, or, if they have not got that ready, hot water. But the children cry with terror if I touch them or go too near; and one little boy in a school we went into simply trembled with fear all the time I stood near him to hear him read. Sometimes also the dogs run away without barking, they are so afraid: a great comfort this is, for the barking of the dogs, and the loathsome-looking pigs at each cottage, and the smells, are the great objection to going through the often lovely-looking—from a distance—villages. Hoang San Tung, on its terrace nearly a hundred feet above the river, with all its curved roofs, looked really like a flight of doves settled down there, the wings not quite folded yet; and several of the others are very picturesque from a distance. But the smells of Ping Shan Pa obliged us to change our anchorage, there being no reason why we should endure them. There were fireflies there; but not such glorious ones as at Shih Pai, where they cast long trails of light upon the river, and were the most luminous I have ever seen. I do hope there will be soon a steamer running to transport people safely and easily to this delightful region. No boats were able to come down while we were up the river; and of some machinery for the Viceroy of Szechuan, that came up here on the previous voyage of the steamer in which we travelled, we have heard already that two boatloads are lost, and it is just as likely as not that the loss of these may make the rest useless.

"Seeing these ranges of mountains, across which it would, indeed, be difficult to make roads, and across which there certainly are none, I better realise how completely the rich and productive province of Szechuan—the size of France—is cut off from the rest of the world. Yet it will be sad if steamers introduce an unappreciative crowd to the grand solitudes of the ravines and precipices, the rocks and rapids of the Yangtse. Now one can pick one's hands full of flowers, without thinking one is spoiling any one else's enjoyment. Now one is away from letters and papers, from all the 'warstle and the wear o't,' and can enjoy the health-giving breezes and the grandeur of the scenery quite undisturbed. It does not require to have lived perspiring and almost clotheless through the tea-season at Hankow to enjoy such a trip; but now I begin to realise more than I did at the time what Hankow is, with its willow-shaded Bund, and its painted tea-chests flying along on the shoulders of coolies, and agitated buyers and sellers, and no 'mountain and water' beauty, as the Chinese call the beauty of landscape, only its mirages and its sunsets."

It is always pleasant to sail before a wind, and boat-travel taken thus is the delight of travel in essence divested of all its ennuis, of tiresome fellow-travellers, dust, steam, rush! Yet there is rushing enough in the Yangtse Rapids; but rushing of such another sort! We ran upon a rock our first day, and were not able to find a leak that night by the flickering light of a Chinese candle. But next day a bag of damaged rice showed clearly where it was, and a little tangle of cotton-yarn with some tallow made it all right. After that our mast cracked so alarmingly that we shortened sail; but that also was soon made right, the sole of an old shoe being nailed over the crack. Old shoes seem to have lasting power. And we sailed on again before the favourable wind that had carried us from Ichang, all through the Yangtse Gorges, in less than a week. Was some of our good fortune owing to the three joss-sticks burning at the stern? They also were stuck in an old shoe, or rather straw sandal this time. Perhaps old shoes have a meaning, like so many other things in China, not understood by people not imbued from their cradles with the profound truths of Fung shui.

Our voyage was like a dream of childhood realised, a dream inspired by many readings of Sinbad's marvellous travels. At Ichang they were making merry over a disappointed globe-trotter, who had been to see the Gorges, and come back complaining they were not perpendicular! Whether he insisted on their descending perpendicularly to their winter water-line, or their summer water-line, not seldom sixty feet apart, report said not. But if he had come on to the Bellows Gorge, surely even he must have been satisfied. The great Szechuan Road, the one new road I have seen in China, is simply hewn out of the face of the apparently perpendicular rock, so that the cliff arches over it. There on the southern side are the square holes in the rock, memorial of Chinese daring, which the celebrated General Meng Liang caused to be made, so that in the night he could take his soldiers, on pieces of wood stuck into these square holes, a rude but strong ladder, up the face of the cliff, naturally supposed to be inaccessible, and surprise the enemy, thereby conquering the kingdom of Shu. There also are the caves, where men gather saltpetre at dizzy heights, climbing up to them by paths that make one hot to look at. Farther on are the iron pillars on one side, and opposite the holes in the rock, between which chains were fastened so as to prevent those of the kingdom to the west of the Gorges from coming down in their vessels to attack the men of Hupeh, then the kingdom of Wei. And here, as we left the gorge, we saw the temple to the memory of Liu Pei, who was there encamped, and slain when Meng Liang made his marvellous night attack. This borderland teems with memories, and the Chinese do not quickly forget. In Kweichow there is still a tablet to the wife of Liu Pei, over the well at the back of what is now the Prefect's official residence, where she drowned herself when her husband was slain, nearly two thousand years ago.

But the day we were there was New Year's Eve, and even our man-servant said it was impossible for me to go into the city to see it that day; and on the next day's festival it would be cruel to trouble our good soldiers to escort us. For we were travelling with that great luxury, a gunboat, that is also a lifeboat; and the soldiers, as in all this admirably organised lifeboat service, were excellent fellows, whether for handling an oar or for keeping back the crowd. They seemed positively to delight in carrying the camera, or in posing for a foreground, evidently admiring their own clothes very much, and being very wishful to know if we could read the characters upon their jackets. But for this gunboat, which sailed faster than our passenger-boat, and could put us ashore anywhere, we should have been deprived of nearly all our interesting walks; for our boat sailed on and on even into the night. Sailing through the never-ending Witches' Gorge, ever following White Wings before, a beautifully appointed junk, that had kept just ahead of us all day, and seeing our first sunset since we started, soft saffron in the west, had a very magical effect. It seemed impossible ever to go back again to one's friends. Why not sail on for ever, since one had for once discovered the Ideal Life?

But there were other moments, and moments oft repeated, when all was excitement and action. Wild shouts and waving of arms encouraged the steaming trackers. The water boiled round the bows. The drum sounded. A man sprang on to an almost impossible rock—it is climbed at least twenty times nearly every day—and disengaged the tow-line, on which our lives were depending. The camera was at full cock! And then a sailor reached in front of it, and that moment was lost! But the boat hung fire, and we tried again. At one rapid there were women tracking—women with their hoof-like feet and loathly trousers, giving delicate little pulls, that surely could not advance the boat much. Then our soldiers were poling and hooking, with crimson faces and straining arms! Now we are through that race, and flying along in the eddy preparatory to the tug-of-war at the next rapid! The trackers are running ahead like a pack of beagles. A side-ravine becomes visible, with a grand gateway, irresistibly recalling Coleridge's "like cliffs that have been rent asunder." Then we gaze at caves, squared, and with fresh-looking ladders hanging from them, and understand they are places of refuge for the husbandmen in the houses opposite to retire into should danger threaten, and that it is not so very long since they were used. Certainly, they would appear able to stand every siege but that of hunger.

We passed rocks fluted like organ-pipes, with the stones that had done the fluting still held captive in them; rocks fretted almost into lacework by the action of the water; rocks weathered red, and rocks weathered grey; and one day we saw a black mass, which we were told was harder than steel, yet it was gnarled and gnawn in rings. After passing that black mass, the strata sloped from east to west, just as on the other side of the Gorges they sloped from west to east; thus, coming up-stream, the rocks no longer seemed so menacing as before.

"But here are the far-famed singing girls of Kweichow, with reedlike voices, and a man, very pale, with a face like Dante, for accompanist on a pretty little viol; and the sound of merry-making increases. Our soldiers have been cooking their pig's head nearly all day. A mandarin's boat moored next to us has a regular witches' cauldron, full of the cock that every one has been carrying about these last few days, comb, legs, and all, a pig's head, and several more uncanny-looking bits of meat. Evidently our trackers also are enjoying a good feed outside. We have twenty lusty rogues, besides our boat's crew. And we are all moored in a tangled mass; so that there does not seem to be room for even one boat more to spend its New Year at Kweichow Fu. There are joss-sticks burning at our cabin door. Joss-sticks were burnt solemnly over our pig's head in the gorge in the morning of that day, a cannon solemnly fired three times, and the cook prostrated himself as he offered the burnt-offering. Now crackers are going off all round; and every man who has a chance has asked me if I do not think Szechuan the most beautiful country in the world. Even the captain tried to hurry me in the morning into photographing the entrance into the first Szechuan gorge. 'Szechuan is beautiful,' he said. So say all the men with white handkerchiefs bound round their brows, thus showing their Western origin."

But it was all beautiful, all wild, all grand, after we entered the Land of Promise through the gate of the Ichang Gorge. For those who do not love Nature in her wilder moods this was not the time of year to travel through the Gorges. They should wait till spring has garlanded them with flowers like a Mayfair ballroom, and perfumed the breezes with their fragrance. There is a certain sameness about the grandeur of the scenery when seen always under a leaden sky with a north-easter driving us on. But for those who admire precipice piled upon precipice, and rocks rent asunder, every season is the season for the Gorges, where the Niukan is perhaps the loveliest; but the Ping Shu Gorge and that of the Fearsome Pool are certainly the most solemn and impressive; while the Witches' Gorge offers the most variety, and the Ichang Gorge, though perhaps only because it is best known, ever seems the friendliest, and is certainly the most fantastic.