under the conditions of Celestial refinement and civilization on one
side, and untutored barbarism on the other.

Having duly copied my passport (apropos of the Chinese doing almost
everything in a precisely opposite way to ourselves may be pointed out
the fact that, instead of attaching vises to the traveller's passport,
like European nations, each official copies off the entire document), the
little officer with much bowing and scraping leads the way back to the
ferry. My explanation that I am bound in the other direction elicits
sundry additional bobbings of the head and soothing utterances and
smiles, but he points reassuringly to the ferry. Arriving at the river,
the little officer is dumbfounded to discover that I have no sampan--that
I am not travelling by boat, but overland on the bicycle. Such a
possibility had never entered his head; nor is it wonderful that it
should not, considering the likelihood that nobody, in all his
experience, had ever travelled to Kui-kiang from here except by boat.
Least of all would he imagine that a stray Fankwae should be travelling
otherwise.

At the ferry we meet the officer who first ordered the soldiers to take
me in charge, and who now accompanies us back to the yamen. Evidently
desirous of unfathoming the mystery of my incomprehensible mode of
travelling through the country, these two officers spend much of the
evening with me in the hittim smoking and keeping up an animated effort
to converse. Notwithstanding my viceregal passport, the superior officer
very plainly entertains suspicions as to my motives in undertaking this
journey; his superficial politeness no more conceals his suspicions than
a glass globe conceals a fish. Before they take their departure three
yameni-runners are stationed in my room to assume the responsibility for
my safe-keeping during the night.

An hour or so is spent waiting in the yamen next morning, apparently for
the gratification of visitors continually arriving. When the yamen is
crowded with people I am provided with a boiled fish and a pair of
chop-sticks. Witnessing the consumption of this fish by the Fankwae is
the finale of the "exhibition," and candor compels me to chronicle the
fact that it fairly brings down the house.

It is a drizzly, disagreeable morning as I trundle out of the city gate
over cobble-stones, made slippery by the rain. Walking before me is a
slim young yameni-runner with a short bamboo-spear, and on his back a
wh