igures are almost of ball-like rotundity; the hands
are drawn up entirely out of sight in the long, loosely flowing sleeves,
while the head is half-hidden by being drawn, turtle-like, into their
blue-quilted shells. Like the Persians, they seem nipped and miserable in
the cold; looking at them, standing about with humped backs and pinched
faces this morning, I wonder, with the Chinaman's happy nonchalance about
committing suicide, why they don't all seek relief within the nice warm
tombs at the end of the village. Surely it can be nothing but their
rampant curiosity, urging them to live on and on in the hopes of seeing
something new and novel, that keeps them from collapsing entirely in the
winter.

My epicurean carriers indulge largely in chopped cayenne peppers this
morning, which they mis liberally with their food.

The paths at least get no worse than they were yesterday, and to-day I
meet the first passenger-wheelbarrow, with its big wheel in the centre, a
bulky female with a baby on one side, and a bale of merchandise on the
other. Sometimes our road brings us to the banks of the Kan-kiang, and
most of the time, even when a mile or two away, we can see the queer,
corrugated sails of the sampans.

Once to-day we happen upon a fleet of fourteen cormorant fishers at a
moment when the excitement of their pursuit is at its height. About
seventy or eighty cormorants are diving and chasing about among a shoal
of fish in a big silent pool, while fourteen wildly excited Chinamen,
clad in abbreviated breech-cloths, dart their bamboo rafts about hither
and thither, urging each one his own cormorants to dive by tapping them
smartly with their poles. The scene is animated in the extreme, a unique
picture of Chinese river-life not to be easily forgotten.

About two o'clock in the afternoon we arrive at a city that I flatter
myself is Kan-tchou-foo; all attempts to question the carriers or anybody
else in regard to the matter results in the hopeless bewilderment of both
them and myself. The carriers are not such ignoramuses in the art of
pantomime, however, but that they are able to announce their intention of
stopping here for the remainder of the day, and night.

The liberality of my purse for a short day and a half, with its
concomitant luxurious living, has so thoroughly demoralized the
unaccustomed river-men, that they encroach still further upon my bounty
and forbearance by revelling all night in the sensuous delights