ess
moderates headed by the President. As he gets a chance he appears to be
putting his men in. The immediate gain seems to be negative in keeping
the other crowd out instead of positive, but they are at least honest
and will probably respond when there is enough organized liberal
pressure brought to bear upon them.

It cannot be denied that it is hot here. Yesterday we went out in
'rickshas about the middle of the day and I don't believe I ever felt
such heat. It is like the Yosemite, only considerably more intense as
well as for longer periods of time. The only consolation one gets from
noting that it isn't humid is that if it were, one couldn't live at all.
But the desert sands aren't moist either. Your mother asked the coolie
why he didn't wear a hat, and he said because it was too hot. Think of
pulling a person at the rate of five or six miles an hour in the sun of
a hundred and twenty or thirty with your head exposed. Most of the
coolies who work in the sun have nothing on their heads. It's either
survival of the fittest or inheritance of acquired characteristics.
Their adaptation to every kind of physical discomfort is certainly one
of the wonders of the world. You ought to see the places where they lie
down to go to sleep. They have it all over Napoleon. This is also the
country of itinerant domesticity. I doubt if lots of the 'ricksha men
have any places to sleep except in their carts. And a large part of the
population must buy their food of the street pedlars, who sell every
conceivable cooked thing; then there are lots of cooked food stores
besides the street men.

PEKING, July 2.

The rainy season has set in, and now we have floods and also coolness,
the temperature having fallen from the late nineties to the early
seventies, and life seems more worth living again.

This is a great country for pictures, and I am most anxious for one of a
middle-aged Chinese, inclining to be fat, with a broad-brimmed straw
hat, sitting on the back of a very small and placid cream colored
donkey. He is fanning himself as the donkey moves imperceptibly along
the highway, is satisfied with himself and at ease with the world, and
everything in the world, whatever happens. This would be a good
frontispiece for a book on China--and the joke wouldn't all be on the
Chinese either.

To-day the report is that the Chinese delegates refused to sign the
Paris treaty; the news seems too good to be true, but nobody can learn