Huanglenpu.
If we dil not come down upon Yung-chang fa in the dashing poetical method of the Assyrians on the fold, we at least came down in a way sufficient to drive terror into any moderately susce;-tible heart. Four of our rag-tag and bob-tail guard marched ahead, clearing a way through the crooked streets, as self-conscious constables clear the course on Ep-om Downs, and everybody—c olies, donkeys, fifth-class mandarins, merchants, afternoon swaggerers down the Yung-chang fu High Street, fruit-sellers, water-carriers, and buffaloes, were pressed prumiscuously into every available china shop, tea house, and rice restaurant. We followed with our bicycles, and were flanked bys couple of the inst vampire-visaged warriors that could be found in Yunnan, and the other two soldiers brought up the rear, busy flicking frolicsune youths over the head with bamboo poles, because they displayed x characteristically youthful de-ive of flinging rotten fruit and electioneering eggs at the foreign devils.
"Fe, fo, fam, smell the blood of three Englishmen,"
dently the unsoothing sentiments nese horde, and they came after us in style.
proved rowdy and obstreperous turned into the first inn we saw, but the lanky landlord would not have us, 'I have no room, every place is filled; go away quick; don't you see the crowd? Do go away, you will find a better inn up the street." With frank and uncurbed plainness we unfolded our opinion of him. We swept along the street, past a crowd of drinking shops, where Chinamen can get gloriously fuddled on _semshu—s blend of gin, paraffin oil, and cayenne—for the eighth of a penny, and past a conglomeration of firework designs, tissue paper horses mounted by tissue paper soldiers, intended to sail away on the evening breeze as balloons, preparatory, we conceived, to x pyrotechnic display. in jubilation over the quietus h had been administered to a trio of ruding foreigners.
We went to another inn.
Boniface conceived an immediate anti pat) with vexation and a piece of tough brushed us out of his court u'von the crowd increased their hilarity by thy ong stones. We looked at the leaders, and, "8 courageous as Corporal Nym, said, "T' have the humour to knock you it Aifferent.'¥ well." But we agreed that the Falstafian precept about valour was best, and suid we Would go tu the temple ani take up our Quarters there. In thi minutes we were in the holy place, with the yelling fiends surging into the yard after us.
We tid the guard to remove th" mob. But the mob only laughed, and the sol-@iers ssid as they belonged to Tenyyueh they had no influence in Yungchongfu, Thereupon they vanished from our sight and we never saw them more We st in the temple amid a mass of blue and yellow and green fantastics, with a very shoddy Buddha behind a gauze screen, and a lot of smouldering incense shunt that made us sneeze. A hurried message was sent to the yamen that we wanted pretectios. The answer came back thatit was not cus'om-ary for visitors to Yungchangfa to be supplied with guards. We decided to be our own gustd, and three pairs of fists were soon banging about, and the who'e mob of between two three hundred fled Lelier-skelter. When fifty yards off, they stood and screech!, then moved step by step- nearer and nearer, -until another sally was necessary, and so on for an hour. Suddenly a stout-srt fellow, arm-d with a two-inch-thick chain, six feet long and carried double, appeared un the scene, Ho swung the chain merei'essly among the howling fanatics. We know not what damage he did, nor, if ths truth be told, did we care. When we asked where he came from, he sull his master, a wealthy mor~ chant, had heard of our difficulty, and had rent him to our a sistance. M-awhile a peremptory second mes-age, backed up by our pass -rts, had been dispatched to the yamen, and the effect was that six soldiers arrived at once. The inquisitive Yung-chang fu people were not, however, to be reatreined by such n force: there, were frequent incursions, followed by very hurried excursions. guard, when they caught a wretch, seized him by lis ply-tail, threw hin on the ground, and_belaboured with their staves till he shrieked again.
men were rushed into privu ious of our personal unw-rthiness, and having no particular fancy to sleep under the supercilious gaze of even a tarnished Buddha, we moved across the yard to the court 'f justi other lands is blind, filthy. It was not a pleasant. habitation. 'There was a muss of grimy curving and dust-covered tables of the law, and there was a big picture of brach-complexioned gentleman, quite bald, but with the hair that grew' about the nape of his neck brushed carefully over his ears, administering punish underfed creature, exhibiting two more ribs than are accorded to ordinary humanity, and the only table in the room was strewn with soft rice. Stray pieces of boiled onhbvago had to be removed from the forms before we could sit down.
A visit'from the mandarin in the evening whiled away an hour, He came ina palanquin, preceded by " small army of lantern curriers and sword bearers, and he shook us all by the hand in Europenn style, and probably said a lot of pretty things could wa only lave understood him, He was very Tong and cadaverous, and sunken-eyed and deaf. Ta talk wth " deaf official at any time la not ewy, bub to talk with " deaf Chinese mandarin when you don't. know Chinvse, runs perilously near the ludicrous. However, he made us understand that unripe peaches were not good to eat, tht bicycles were things not usually ridden in China, and that the world was a big place.
Yungchangfu was our resting spot from a Saturday till Monday, and though there was no opportunity for us to exercise a Sabbaterian sanctimoniousness, the priests in, charge of the temple sufficiently com-lusted for our Incking by making a horrible din, beating tom-toms all the Saturday evening, thw greater part of Sunday. and again early on Monday morning, and all the time chanting and singing in rasping, croaking voices that certainly much needed sandpapering.
There were several cockerels about that temple, which we thought the most extraordinary chsnticleers in the world, until we had proceeded further towards the interior and investigated the matter, and then we knew they were just the same as other male danizes of a fowl roost. We have heard of a man who could imitate the crow of a cock ro naturally that the sun used to begin rising at midnight, But that man was an Amériem, No si ever inclined to early rising thu crowing of a Chinese cock. The primal progenitor of C: inese poultry must have been afflicted with chronic tore throat, and cocks crow in Chinese with a German accent." It is a wonderful crow, Teutonic and asthmatic, and drawn out painfully, like the groinning of " rusty dour.
Pushing our investigation further we found that natural history in the East is different to uatucal history in the" We
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.