s mile after mile of rocky way from Nankou village
through the Pass. To begin with, we were ourselves funny-looking
enough, for my donkey was so small that he could almost walk under the
belly of my saddle-horse at home, and my feet almost touched the
ground. The donkeys ridden by my friends were but little larger, and
altogether we looked very much like three clowns riding trick mules--
an effect somewhat heightened when the Frenchman's donkey dropped him
twice in the mud! It was our clothing, however, our ordinary American
and European trousers, coats, overcoats and hats, and the fact that we
wore no queues down our backs, that made us objects of curiosity to
the Mongolian and Manchurian camel-drivers, shepherds, horse-traders,
and mule-pack drivers whom we met on the way, just as we were
interested in the sheepskin overcoats, strange hats, etc., which we
found them wearing along with the usual cotton-padded garments. These
cotton-padded clothes are much like those heavily padded bed-quilts
ineptly called "comforts," and as the poor Chinese in the colder
sections of the empire cannot afford much fire in winter, they add one
layer of cotton padding after another until it is difficult for them
to waddle along.

On the whole, the life and travel we found on our donkey-ride over the
rough roads of Nankou Pass were Biblical in their {120} very
simplicity and primitiveness. Most of the men we meet come from away
up in Mongolia, where no railroad has yet gone, and the camels and the
donkeys (the donkeys in most cases larger than those we rode) bring
down on their backs the Mongolian products--wool, hides, grain,
etc.--and carry back coal, clothing, and the other simple supplies
demanded by the rude peasantry of Mongolia. We met several pack trains
of donkeys, sometimes twenty-five or forty, I suppose, each carrying a
heavy load of sacks on his back, or perhaps big, well-packed baskets
or goods-boxes carefully balanced. A horse over here will tote about
as much as a horse at home would pull. Then there were several immense
droves of sheep: in one drove two or three thousand, I estimated, and
every sheep with a black face and a white body, so that the general
effect was not unlike seeing a big bin of black-eyed peas. The Chinese
raise immense numbers of long-eared black hogs, too, and drive them to
market loose in the same way that they drive their sheep. We also met
two or three droves of mountain horses, a hundred or more to