ye hundred English miles from Tachienlu is from two thousand (ree hundred to jon the Tibetan Border to Shanghai by the Yangtze River. The road for eight days winds in and out among mountain ranges and over high passes to Yachou. The numerous narrow valleys are well supplied with water. Wherever there is a narrow strip of land on the banks of the streams it is well cultivated and very productive. Corn and buckwheat are grown. Rice is ver searce and so expensive that only a smal proportion of the people can afford to eat it.
Poverty abounds, with the result thatthe Poginese in dirt_and ings. They eat cakes ulation live in the poorest kinds of huts made of corn meal or buckwheat flour mixed with water and cooked in hot ashes. Most of the best houses have mod walls with square openings for windows. The roofs are made of thin split spruce. briards aid on, top of each other and held in place by stones, which re laid on top of the boards in rows from six to eight inches apart. all along the way, from five to twenty-li apart, are small towns and villages, where the traveller can find shelter for the night for himself and his ponies and coolies.
There are two passes, one four days from Tachienlu, about seven thousand fest high, and another, the sixth day, about nine thousand feet above sea level. The people have a strange superstition about the higher one of the two. Whey believe that if the traveller calls out in a loud voice while at the summit, something dreadful is sure to happen before the bottom is reached on the other side. In support of the superstition a commonly be-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.