er
an awful tugging through sand-hills, unbridged ravines and water. Hardly
able to stand from fatigue and the pain of my knee, the desperate nature
of the road, or, more correctly, the entire absence of anything of the
kind, and the disquieting incident of the night, awaken me to a realizing
sense of my helplessness should the people of Quang-shi prove to be
hostile. Conscious of my inability to run or ride, savagely hungry, and
desperately tired, I enter Quang-shi with the spirit of a hunted animal
at bay. With revolver pulled round to the front ready to hand, and half
expecting occasion to use it in defence of my life, I grimly speculate on
the number of my cartridges and the probability of each one bagging a
sore-eyed Celestial ere my own lonely and reluctant ghost is yielded up.

All this, fortunately, is found to be superfluous speculation, for the
good people of Quang-shi prove, at least, passively friendly; a handful
of tsin divided among the youngsters, and a general spendthrift
scatterment of ten cents' worth of the same base currency among the
stall-keepers for chow-chow heightens their friendly interest in me to an
appreciable extent.

Chao-choo-foo is the next city marked on my itinerary, but as Quang-shi
is not on my map I have no means of judging whether Chao-choo-foo is four
li up-stream or forty. All attempts to obtain some idea of the distance
from the natives result in the utter bewilderment of both questioned and
querist. No amount of counting on fingers, or marking on paper, or
interrogative arching of eyebrows, or repetition of "Chao-choo-foo li"
sheds a glimmer of light on the mind of the most intelligent-looking
shopkeeper in Quang-shi concerning my wants. Yet, withal, he courteously
bears with my, to him, idiotic pantomime and barbarous pronunciation, and
repeats parrot-like after me "Chao-choo-foo li; Chao-choo-foo li" with
sundry beaming smiles and friendly smirks.

Far easier, however, is it to make them understand that I want to go to
that city by boat. The loquacious owner of a twenty-foot sampan puts in
his appearance as soon as my want is ascertained, and favors me with an
unpunctuated speech of some five minutes' duration. For fear I shouldn't
quite understand the tenor of his remarks, he insists on thrusting his
yellow Mongolian phiz within an inch or two of mine own. At the end of
five minutes I thrust my fingers in my ears out of sheer consideration
for his vocal organs, and turn aw