carve it in
the studio. With the Chinese the difficulty is one of transport--the
finished work is obviously lighter than the unhewn block. In Yunnan, up
to the present, I had seen no mason at work, for no masonry was needed.
Houses built of stone were falling into ruin, and only thatched,
mud-plastered, bamboo and wood houses were being built in their places.

At Laowatan I told my Christian to hire me a chair for thirty or forty
li, and he did so, but the chair, instead of carrying me the shorter
distance, carried me the whole day. The following day the chair kept
company with me, and as I had not ordered it, I naturally walked; but
the third day also the chair haunted me, and then I discovered that my
admirable guide had engaged the chair not for thirty or forty li, as I
had instructed him in my best Chinese, but for three hundred and sixty
li, for four days' stages of ninety li each. He had made the agreement
"out of consideration for me," and his own pocket; he had made an
agreement which gave him wider scope for a little private arrangement of
his own with the chair-coolies. For two days I was paying fifteen cash a
li for a chair and walking alongside of it charmed by the good humour of
the coolies, and unaware that they were laughing in their sleeves at my
folly. Trifling mistakes like this are inevitable to one who travels in
China without an interpreter.

My two coolies were capital fellows, full of good humour, cheerful, and
untiring. The elder was disposed to be argumentative with his
countrymen, but he could not quarrel. Nature had given him an
uncontrollable stutter, and, if he tried to speak quickly, spasm seized
his tongue, and he had to break into a laugh. Few men in China, I think,
could be more curiously constructed than this coolie. He was all neck;
his chin was simply an upward prolongation of his neck like a second
"Adam's apple." Both were very pleasant companions. They were naturally
in good humour, for they were well paid, and their loads, as loads are
in China, were almost insignificant; I had only asked them to carry
sixty-seven pounds each.

We, who live amid the advantages of Western civilisation, can hardly
realise how enormous are the weights borne by those human beasts of
burthen, our brothers in China. The common fast-travelling coolie of
Szechuen contracts to carry eighty catties (107lbs.), forty miles a day
over difficult country. But the weight-carrying coolie, travelling
shorter dis