ber
of males at the capital, and the prevalence there of goitre or thick
neck, a deformity which is absent from the district of Chaotong.
Infanticide in a starving city like this is dreadfully common. "For the
parents, seeing their children must be doomed to poverty, think it
better at once to let the soul escape in search of a more happy asylum
than to linger in one condemned to want and wretchedness." The
infanticide is, however, exclusively confined to the destruction of
female children, the sons being permitted to live in order to continue
the ancestral sacrifices.

One mother I met, who was employed by the mission, told the missionary
in ordinary conversation that she had suffocated in turn three of her
female children within a few days of birth; and, when a fourth was born,
so enraged was her husband to discover that it was also a girl that he
seized it by the legs and struck it against the wall and killed it.

Dead children, and often living infants, are thrown out on the common
among the gravemounds, and may be seen there any morning being gnawed by
dogs. Mr. Tremberth of the Bible Christian Mission, leaving by the south
gate early one morning, disturbed a dog eating a still living child
that had been thrown over the wall during the night. Its little arm was
crunched and stript of flesh, and it was whining inarticulately--it died
almost immediately. A man came to see me, who for a long time used to
heap up merit for himself in heaven by acting as a city scavenger. Early
every morning he went round the city picking up dead dogs and dead cats
in order to bury them decently--who could tell, perhaps the soul of his
grandfather had found habitation in that cat? While he was doing this
pious work, never a morning passed that he did not find a dead child,
and usually three or four. The dead of the poor people are roughly
buried near the surface and eaten by dogs.

An instance of the undoubted truth of the doctrine of transmigration
occurred recently in Chaotong and is worth recording. A cow was killed
near the south gate on whose intestine--and this fact can be attested by
all who saw it--was written plainly and unmistakably the character
"_Wong_," which proved, they told me, that the soul of one whose name
was Wong had returned to earth in the body of that cow.

I stayed two days in Chaotong, and strolled in pleasant company through
the city. Close to the Mission is the yamen of the Chentai or
Brigadier-General, t