l it could
to smooth my way across Yunnan, but perhaps that was due in part to the
fact that the chief of the bureau had been for several years consul in
New York. By arrangement I called one afternoon, in company with a
missionary lady, upon his wife. Threading our way through narrow,
winding streets, our chairs turned in at an inconspicuous doorway and we
found ourselves in a large compound, containing not so much one house as
a number of houses set down among gay gardens. The building in which we
were received consisted apparently of two rooms, an anteroom and a
reception room. The latter was furnished in the usual style (invariable,
it seems to me, from country inn to prince's palace), heavy high
chairs, heavy high tables ranged against walls decorated with kakemonos
and gay mottoes; only in the centre of the room was a large table
covered with a cloth of European manufacture on which were set out
dishes of English biscuits and sweets. Our hostess, dressed in a
modified Chinese costume, received us with graceful dignity. Her
fine-featured face bore a marked likeness to many that one meets on the
street or in the church of an old New England town, and its rather
anxious expression somewhat emphasized the resemblance. She spoke with
much pleasure of the years she had spent in America, and her daughter,
who had been educated in a well-known private school in New York, looked
back longingly to those days, complaining that there was no society in
Yunnan-fu; but she brightened up at a reference to the arrival of a new
and young English vice-consul, hoping that it might mean some tennis. It
was an unexpected touch of New China in this out-of-the-way corner.
Before we left, two younger children were brought in, both born in
America, and one bearing the name "Daisy," the other "Lincoln," but
already they were forgetting their English.

During my three days in Yunnan-fu,[1] through the kindness of the
British Consul-General I was given a chance to make one or two
excursions into the surrounding country. An especially charming trip
that we took one afternoon was to Chin Tien, or "Golden Temple," a
celebrated copper temple about five miles out. Near the town our chairs
were borne along the narrow earth balk between the bean- and
rice-fields, but farther on our way led over the top of a high dyke
lined with trees. We mounted by a charming winding road to the temple,
set high on the hillside among its own groves of conifers, the