superior way at me on foot. The Chinese sees
no reason for walking if he has a chair or pony. What are the chair and
the pony for? They must lack imagination, or how can they ride down the
awful staircases of a West China road, the pony plunging from step to
step under his heavy load? I doubt if they realize either the pony's
suffering or the rider's danger. I did both, and so I often walked.
After a climb of three thousand feet we came out on a wide open plateau,
beautifully cultivated, which we crossed to our night stopping-place,
Chiang-yi, nearly seven thousand feet above sea level.

We started the next morning in the rain, which kept up pretty much all
day. The country through which we now passed was rather bare of
cultivation and of inhabitants, but the wealth and variety of flowers
and shrubs more than made amends. Nowhere have I seen such numbers of
flowering shrubs as all through this region, a few known to me, but most
of them quite new. It was with much gratification that I learned at a
later time of the remarkable work done in connection with the Arnold
Arboretum near Boston in seeking out and bringing to America specimens
of many of China's beautiful trees and plants. At the head of one small
valley we passed a charming temple half buried in oleanders and
surrounded by its own shimmering green rice-fields, and a little farther
on we came to a farmhouse enclosed in a rose hedge some twelve feet high
and in full bloom. There was no sign of life about, and it might have
served as the refuge of the Sleeping Princess, but a nearer inspection
would probably have been disillusioning.

We stopped that night at Ho-k'ou, a small place of which I saw little,
for the heavy rain that kept us there over a day held me a prisoner in
the inn. I had a small room over the pony's stable, and I spent the
forenoon writing to the tune of comfortable crunching of corn and beans.
The rest of the day I amused myself in entertaining the women of the inn
with the contents of my dressing-case, and when it grew cold in my open
loft I joined the circle round the good coal fire burning in a brazier
in the public room. Every one was friendly, and persistent, men and
women alike, in urging me to take whiffs from their long-stemmed tobacco
pipes. All smoke, using sometimes this long-stemmed, small-bowled pipe,
and sometimes the water pipe, akin in principle to the Indian
hubble-bubble. In this part of Szechuan I saw few smoking cigarettes,