rooms) for E----, one for me, one for a
salon, one for the dining-room. This makes four rooms, European
calculation, twelve according to Chinese, and leaves nothing for
guest-rooms, trunk-rooms, a study, or anything of the kind. Therefore,
all joking aside, a house of a hundred rooms might do for us nicely!

How lovely they are, these one-story stone houses, with their tiled
roofs, red lacquered doors, fine, delicate carvings on the
window-lattices, and all the rest of it! The floors are of stone, but
foreigners have wooden floors laid down. The winters are bitter here,
and before these Chinese houses can be made comfortable according to
Western ideas, much must be done to them. Some foreigners put in glass
windows in place of the thick, cottony paper windows of the Chinese. The
paper windows shut out the cold, it is true, but, being opaque, they
also shut out the sunlight. And how gorgeously they are furnished! Such
ebony chairs, such wonderful carved tables! Now and then we meet some
one who has picked up an old opium divan, a magnificent, huge bench of
carved ebony, with marble seat and marble back, very deep, capable of
holding two people lying crosswise at full length, with room for the
smoker's table between them. Only, the opium tables have been dispensed
with, and their place is taken by cushions of beautiful brocade, of rich
embroidery, which add something of warmth and comfort to the enormous
couch. Mind you, all this furniture can be bought very cheap. To live
Chinese fashion is not expensive at all, despite the impression of
magnificence and luxury, which is rather overwhelming. When one
considers that the most ordinary Chinese things are sold in America at a
profit of three or four hundred per cent., the outlay for Chinese
furniture in Peking is not great.

As to heating, stoves do it. Every room--I mean every one of these
separate buildings--is heated by its stove; a good big one, too.
Russian stoves are found here and there, and any one who possesses a
Russian stove is well equipped to withstand the bitterest winter. Now
and then open fireplaces are introduced, but the big stoves go on
functioning just the same.

These Chinese houses are charming from the outside. You wind your way
along a narrow, unpaved street, or _hutung_,--a street full of little
open-air shops, cook-shops, stalls of various kinds, and then come upon
a high, blank wall, with a pair of stone lions at the gateway and an
enormous red