some things
not wholly under control. The present customs regulations certainly tend
to check the development of trade in Tonking, and the transportation
rates are perhaps more than traffic can bear. The French, however, can
change their policy in these respects if they think best. But the
proposed construction by the Chinese Government of a railway connecting
Yunnan-fu and the West River valley would cut the ground out from under
their feet. For the moment, the Revolution has stopped the enterprise,
but it is certain to be taken up again, as there are no insuperable
engineering obstacles in the way, and every economic and political
reason for giving Yunnan an outlet to the sea through Chinese territory.

On leaving Hanoi in the early morning light we struck across a wide
fertile plain, beautifully cultivated; fields of rice alternating with
maize stretched away to a wall of feathery bamboo broken by stately
palms and glossy mangoes. After a little the country became more broken,
rolling near by, mountainous in the distance. The vegetation, dense and
tropical, hemmed in the line on both sides, but here and there charming
trails led away through the jungle to villages on higher land; a
delightful region to pass through, perhaps to live in if one were a
duck, but for human beings the steamy heat must be very depressing. At
Yun Bay the valley narrowed, and we drew nearer the mountains, but there
was no change in the atmosphere, and had not the sky been cloudy, we
should have suffered greatly from the heat.

My fellow travellers were chiefly officials of the civil administration
or connected with the railway, who chatted or slept or quietly drank
away the weary hours; for them there was no novelty in the trip to dull
the feeling of discomfort. At one small station a man who might have
been a planter got in, followed by an attractive-looking Annamese woman
carrying a little child. She cried bitterly as she waved good-bye to a
group of natives on the station platform. The man seemed well known on
the line, and was soon the centre of a group of his fellows who paid no
attention to the woman. After a while the trio went to sleep, the man on
the carriage bench, the woman and child on the floor. She was what is
euphemistically called a "cook" in Tonking; just another name for an
arrangement so often resulting from the lonely life of Europeans among a
slack-fibred dependent alien population. It is the same thing that
confronts t