es' story of the very little boy who started making a mud man
in the spring branch, but before he got the second arm on, a storm
came up, and when he came back his man had mysteriously disappeared.
But when Johnny went to town next day and for the first time in his
life saw a one-armed man, the whole mystery cleared, and rushing up,
he demanded: "Why didn't you wait for me to finish you?" Somehow the
camel, like Johnny's mud man, always looks to me as if he got away
before he was finished. He is either a preliminary rough sketch
accidentally turned loose on the world, or else he got warped somehow
in the drying process--great, quiet, shaggy, awkward, serene,
goose-necked, saddle-backed Old Slow and Steady!

{117}

[Illustration: A MAN-MADE DESERT.]

[Illustration: PUMPING WATER FOR IRRIGATION.]
The destruction of China's mountain forests has made deserts of vast
areas that were once fair and fruitful. The lower picture, showing
Chinese pumping water by human treadmill, furnishes another
illustration of the Orient's waste of labor.

{118}

[Illustration: TRANSPORTATION AND TRAVEL IN CHINA.]
The camels that come down from Mongolia and wind their unhurried way
from Chien Men Gate to the Gate of the Heavenly Peace form one of
the most picturesque of the many picturesque sights in fascinating
old Peking. The right-hand picture shows the author utilizing the
most rapid means of transit in the mountains north of Peking.

{116 continued}

Let me confess, therefore, that hardly anything else on my entire tour
has given me more pleasure than the sight of the camel trains about
Peking and all the way to the end of the Nankou Pass in the mountains
north of the ancient Chinese {119} capital. At the Pass this morning I saw
three such camel trains coming down from Mongolia and the Desert of
Gobi: long, slow-moving, romantic caravans that made me feel as if I
had become a character in the Arabian Nights or a contemporary of
Kublai-Khan. One of the trains was the longest I have yet
seen--twenty-five or thirty camels, I should say, treading Indian-file
with their usual unostentatious stateliness, a wooden pin through each
camel's nostrils from which a cord bound him to the camel next ahead,
a few strangely dressed drivers guiding the odd Oriental procession.

Nor were the camels the only strange travellers encountered by my
party, a young Frenchman, the German, and myself, as we rode our
little donkey