is intensely blue, and the broad reaches of Band are dazzlingly white; on
either bank are dark patches of feathery bamboo; the white, blue and
green, the pagoda, the city with its towering pawn-houses, and the whole
flanked by red clay hills, forms a picture that certainly is not wanting
in life and color.

The quarters assigned me at the hittim, here, are again upstairs, and my
room-companion is an attenuated opium smoker, who is apparently a
permanent lodger. This apartment is gained by a ladder, and after
submitting to much annoyance from the obtrusive crowds below invading our
quarters, my companion drives them all out with the loud lash of his
tongue, and then draws up the only avenue of communication. He is engaged
in cooking his supper and in washing dirty dishes; when the crowd below
gets too noisy and clamorous he steps to the opening and coolly treats
them to a basin of dish-water. This he repeats a number of times during
the evening, saving his dish-water for that special purpose.

The air is reeking with smoke and disagreeable odors from below, where
cooking is going on, and pigs wallow in filth in a rear apartment. The
back-room of a Chinese inn is nearly always a pigsty, and a noisome place
on general principles. Later in the evening a few privileged characters
are permitted to come up, and the room quickly changes into a regular
opium-den. A tough day's journey and two previous nights of wakefulness,
enable me to fall asleep, notwithstanding the evil smells, the presence
of the opium-smoking visitors, and the grunting pigs and talkative humans
down below.

During the day I have sprained my right knee, and it becomes painful in
the night and wakes me up. In the morning my way is made through the
waking city with a painful limp, that gives rise to much unsympathetic
giggling among the crowd at my heels. Perhaps they think all Pankwaes
thus hobble along; their giggling, however, is doubtless evidence of the
well-known pitiless disposition of the Chinese. The sentiments of pity
and consideration for the sufferings of others, are a well-nigh invisible
quality of John Chinaman's character, and as I limp slowly along, I
mentally picture myself with a broken leg or serious illness, alone among
these people. A Fankwae with his leg broken! a Fankwae lying at the point
of death! why, the whole city would want to witness such an extraordinary
sight; there would be no keeping them out; one would be the centre of a
t