nds in the corner of the room with the
straw bedding (this, by the way, should on no account be removed if one
wishes to sleep in peace), sometimes there is a table, sometimes a
couple of chairs. If these are steady it is lucky, if unbroken it is the
exception; there are never more. Over the bedstead (more often than not,
by the way, it is composed of four planks of varying lengths and
thickness, placed across two trestles) I used first to place my oilskin,
then my _p'u-k'ai_, and that little creeper which rhymes with hug did
not disturb me much. Rats ran round and over me in profusion, and, of
course, the best room being invariably nearest to the pigsties, there
were the usual stenches. The floor was Mother Earth, which in wet
weather became mud, and quite a common thing it was for my joys to be
enhanced during a heavy shower of rain by my having to sleep, almost
suffocated, mackintosh over my head, owing to a slight break in the
continuity of the roof--my umbrella being unavailable, as one of my men
dropped it over a precipice two days out. For many reasons a camp-bed is
to Europeans an indispensable part of even the most modest traveling
equipment. I was many times sorry that I had none with me.

The inns of Szech'wan, however, are by many degrees better than those of
Yuen-nan, which are sometimes indescribable. Earthen floors are saturated
with damp filth and smelling decay; there are rarely the paper windows,
but merely a sort of opening of woodwork, through which the offensive
smells of decaying garbage and human filth waft in almost to choke one;
tables collapse under the weight of one's dinner; walls are always in
decay and hang inwards threateningly; wicked insects, which crawl and
jump and bite, creep over the side of one's rice bowl--and much else.
Who can describe it? It makes one ill to think of it.

Throughout my journeyings it was necessary for my toileting, in fact,
everything, to be performed in absolute unalloyed publicity. Three days
out my boy fixed up a cold bath for me, and barricaded a room which had
a certain amount of privacy about it, owing to its secluded position;
but even grown men and women, anxious to see what _it_ was like when it
had no clothes on, came forward, poked their fingers through the paper
in the windows (of course, glass is hardly known in the interior), and
greedily peeped in. This and the profound curiosity the people evince in
one's every action and movement I found most tr