must tell you that when we crossed ithe Ruce-cours:, after watching the Volunter parade, the sky tothe West was a blaze of cardinal almost to the depth of blood, 80 curious was the sunset's colouring. I stepped int) ricsha and on to the track of dust which led down the Mulooto the Settlement, and discovered I had hit: upon one of those rare coolies whose object it is to outdo every moving rival along the road. The heat was tervitic—it hung like a thing of death over the Chinese house-tops. One could see the thick atmosphere within the darkened, opened rooms, and over the many-coloured crowd as it came and went, and so seemingly impenetrable was the air that there was scarcely a perceptible mo ment on my face a¥ the coolie dashed through it. "The road was thronged with very conceivable conveyance, filled with Chinieso and foreigners, leaving the course for the Settlement and their homes. Te was like riding on into the Inferno, for all in a moment the radiant, cardinal blaze, as if spent out by exhaustion, fall below the horizon, and the sub-tropical massy of night tumbled almost instantaneously on that extraordinarily mysterious, fleeting, Shavghai twilight. Only the beat-haz> hung like scourge around us and remain-el. As the night descended, the Muloo resented terribly grim aspect, groups of half-naked Chinese with fluttering fans Jined the kerbstone or hung over their frail, bright y-gilded verandahs, to see the foreigners and Volunteers g" by. The luathsome strata of Oriental smells pervaded the air in turn. The coolie made w mad career down the road, amid the deafening clatter of hundreds of carriages and the faint sound of the band behind me—swaying outward to evade the axle of a passing' victor turning inward to outstep a competi dashing forward to take his place in the liu of traps, ignoring the detaining and warning hand of a red-turbaned Sikh, only to be pulle up abruptly by an English policeman and reprimanded for having no light according to the Municipal regulation While the coolie obediently relighted hi oil-paper lantern with matches produced from some mysterious corner of the riesha, the policeman made a polite apology for detaining me, and the heat in that pause descended appallingly upon me. A sedan chair with two bearers collided with a heavily laden wheelbarrow, andthe six oceupants raised their shrill voices in expostula~ tion and tumbled all but into my riesha, Al yellow, expressionless, black-eyed duco with crouching figure pected out indifferently from the opening of the chair, looking gruesome in the sickening light.' The closed round me and flapped their fans, observing, but offering no assistance. Nearer came the sound of the band; *Hausau, hausav," I urged hurriedly to' the coolie, whose extreme end of candle appeared to be giving trouble. Pa hav, coolie," I cried desperately, for with the tearing carriages, the Bashing ricshas, the shouts of the police to clear the road for the Volunteers, the darkened night, the odoriferous crowd, and above all the airless heat, T felt terribly depressed. My appeals, howerer, were too Into, the Voluuteers were full upon us and we drew to the side and watched the 1,000 khaki men!
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.