g their unhurried way from
Chien-Men Gate to the Gate of the Heavenly Peace, the yellow-tiled
roofs of the Forbidden City gleaming ahead of them, while to the left
are the faint gray-blue outlines of the Western Hills--all this will
be to me a silent but perpetual invitation to go back.

The very life in the streets presents a panorama of never-failing
interest. One can never forget the throngs of Chinese men in gowns and
queues (the wives wear the trousers over here!), the nobles and
officers in gorgeous silks and velvets; the fantastic head-dress of
the Manchu ladies, and the hobbling movements of the Chinese women
hampered by ruined feet; the ever-hurrying rickshaws with perspiring,
pig-tailed coolies in the shafts; the heavy two-wheeled Peking carts
like half-sized covered wagons; the face of some fashionable foreign
or native woman glimpsed through the glass windows of her sedan chair,
eight runners bearing on their shoulders their human burden; the long
lines of shop fronts with such a pleasing variety of decorative color
as to make one wonder why artists have not made them famous; the
uniformed soldiers from every nation on the earth to guard the various
legations, and {124} Chinese soldiers with cropped hair and foreign
clothing. The strange street noises, too, will linger in one's memory
ever after: the clattering hoofs of fleet Mongolian ponies, the
jingling bells of the thousands of sturdy little saddle donkeys, the
rattling of the big cowbells on the dusty camels, the clanging gong of
a mandarin's carriage, outriders scurrying before and behind to bear
testimony to his rank, and the sharp cries of peddlers of many kinds,
their wares balanced in baskets borne from their shoulders.

Or perhaps there is a blaze in the street ahead of you. Some man has
died and his friends are burning a life-sized, paper-covered horse in
the belief that it will be changed into a real horse to serve him in
the Beyond; and imitations of other things that might be useful to him
are burned in the same way.

Or perhaps a marriage procession may pass. A dozen servants carry
placards with emblems of the rank of the family represented by the
bride or groom, numerous other servants bear presents, and the bride
herself passes by concealed in a gorgeous sedan chair borne on the
shoulders of six or eight coolies.

Fascinating as it is for its present-day interest, however, Peking is
even richer in historic interest. And by historic in C