any heads. "Keep it," I said. "Keep it,
and let the good work go on. My friend, you cannot execute too freely in
this land. You are blessed, I apprehend, with a purely literary
bureaucracy recruited--correct me if I am wrong--from all social strata,
more especially those in which the idea of cold-blooded cruelty has, as
it were, become embedded. Now, when to inherited devildom is superadded
a purely literary education of grim and formal tendencies, the result,
my evil-looking friend,--the result, I repeat,--is a state of affairs
which is faintly indicated in the Little Pilgrim's account of the Hell
of Selfishness. You, I presume, have not yet read the works of the
Little Pilgrim."

"He looks as if he was going to cut at you with that sword," said the
Professor. "Come away and see the Temple of Horrors."

That was a sort of Chinese Madame Tussaud's--life-like models of men
being brayed in mortars, sliced, fried, toasted, stuffed, and variously
bedevilled--that made me sick and unhappy. But the Chinese are merciful
even in their tortures. When a man is ground in a mill, he is, according
to the models, popped in head first. This is hard on the crowd who are
waiting to see the fun, but it saves trouble to the executioners. A
half-ground man has to be carefully watched, or else he wriggles out of
his place. To crown all, we went to the prison, which was a pest-house
in a back street. The Professor shuddered. "It's all right," I said.
"The people who sent the prisoners here don't care. The men themselves
look hideously miserable, but I suppose they don't care, and goodness
knows I don't care. They are only Chinamen. If they treat each other
like dogs, why should we regard 'em as human beings? Let 'em rot. I want
to get back to the steamer. I want to get under the guns of Hong-Kong.
Phew!"

Then we ran through a succession of second-rate streets and houses till
we reached the city wall on the west by a long flight of steps. It was
clean here. The wall had a drop of thirty or forty feet to paddy fields.
Beyond these were a semicircle of hills, every square yard of which is
planted out with graves. Her dead watch Canton the abominable, and the
dead are more than the myriads living. On the grass-grown top of the
wall were rusty English guns spiked and abandoned after the war. They
ought not to be there. A five-storied pagoda gave us a view of the city,
but I was wearied of these rats in their pit--wearied and scared and
sullen