s are thrown on the market, and on an
average can be secured for twenty or thirty dollars each--that is, for
two or three pounds.

The best market is provided by Europeans, and dealers forward the
finest-looking animals to Tientsin, Shanghai, Hongkong, Hankow and
other places where racing is carried on, to meet this demand.

When such mobs of raw ponies reach a treaty-port they are known as
"griffins," which term applies to all that have not previously run at
any race-meeting; and with their tails sweeping the ground, their
hogged manes and their long coats clotted with mud, they present a
very dismal appearance, and one not at all in keeping with the
accepted idea of race-horses.

These griffins mostly pass through the hands of racing men, who, with
a view to securing a good animal, either arrange with the dealers for
private gallops, when the various performances are carefully timed by
stop-watch, or buy their fancies at public auction without speed tests
having previously been made.

Owing to expenses of transport, be it by steamer or by road, the
further south the greater the average value of griffins, and as only
picked animals are supplied to the foreign market, the price is
everywhere far higher than at Peking, and may be said to range from
fifty to five hundred dollars. Those ponies which do not prove to have
sufficient speed to warrant their being trained as racers are resold
as hacks, or filter away at lower prices to the Chinese.

I may here say that although at several of the treaty-ports there are
a few good roads made by the European residents, and along which
imported carriages are occasionally seen to pass, it is only at
Shanghai that vehicular traffic has attained to any considerable
degree of importance. Here the foreign settlements are traversed in
all directions by excellent highways, which extend through the suburbs
for several miles into the adjoining country, and which the Chinese
avail themselves of to a large extent, driving out in thousands every
afternoon to tea-houses and pleasure-gardens.

Besides most well-known varieties of conveyance the celestial mind has
evolved one or two remarkable models of its own, notably, a kind of
victoria, the body of which takes the form of two large inverted
sea-shells gaudily painted with flowers and butterflies, and running
on light iron wheels with bright spokes and rubber tyres. A liveried
coach-man on the box, a footman with a smart rug over the ar