time plaster
the corresponding area on the image of the God. Go into his temple in
Western China, and you will find this deity dripping with plasters, with
scarcely an undesecrated space on his superficies.

At the yamen of the Brigadier-General in Chaotong, the entrance is
guarded by the customary stone images of mythical shape and grotesque
features. They are believed to represent lions, but their faces are not
leonine--they are a reproduction, exaggerated, of the characteristic
features of the bulldog of Western China. The images are of undoubted
value to the city. One is male and the other female. On the sixteenth
day of the first month they are visited by the townspeople, who rub them
energetically with their hands, all over from end to end. Every spot so
touched confers immunity from pain upon the corresponding region of
their own bodies for the ensuing year. And so from year to year these
images are visited. Pain accordingly is almost absent from the city,
and only that man suffers pain who has the temerity to neglect the
opportunity of insuring himself against it.

I was called to a case of opium-poisoning in Chaotong. A son came in
casually to seek our aid in saving his father, who had attempted suicide
with a large over-dose of opium. He had taken it at ten in the morning
and it was now two. We were led to the house and found it a single small
unlit room up a narrow alley. In the room two men were unconcernedly
eating their rice, and in the darkness they seemed to be the only
occupants; but, lying down behind them on a narrow bed, was the dim
figure of the dying man, who was breathing stertorously. A crowd quickly
gathered round the door and pent up the alley-way. Rousing the man, I
caused him to swallow some pints of warm water, and then I gave him a
hypodermic injection of apomorphia. The effect was admirable, and
pleased the spectators even more than the patient.

Opium is almost exclusively the drug used by suicides. No Chinaman would
kill himself by the mutilation of the razor or pistol-shot because awful
is the future punishment of him who would so dare to disturb the
integrity of the body bequeathed to him by his fathers.

China is the land of suicides. I suppose more people die from suicide in
China in proportion to the population than in any other country. Where
the struggle for existence is so keen, it is hardly to be wondered at
that men are so willing to abandon the struggle. But poverty and mi