Tue Chinese traveller pays from 20 to 50 cash for his lodging, buys his flour and meat from the host at market prices, pays and "water money" to the servants! to the extent of a few cash, and picks up his breakfast and noonday meal at roadside stalls and tables. In populous districts fly-blown and dust encrusted dainties are on sale covery few li, Such bounteous districts are lands of milk and honey to the pilgrim. In many localities a horseman pays no lodging. He buys the innkeeper's fodder at a) certain price per night and is lodged free.
When I alighted from the railway carriage in Honanfu three years ago, contemplating a long, leisurely journey into Central Asia, settled in @ fairly comfortable inn and set about hiring carts, I was at once referred to the Moslem; east suburb and later to a "cart, hong' therein, There I hired the necessary conveyances, and incident) tally bought @ horse, paid half the ipulated fees in advance and promised to pay the balance in Hsianfu upon arrival. At the close of this deal, which required some days of heated debate, received a blue lettered document the size of a newspaper, guaranteeing—_ the! character of the oarsmen, the duration of the journey, the quality of the horses and mules, and the safe delivery of all my effects.
The next day the carts clanked up to the inn gate, hooded with straw mats, which I had been forced to buy, and my boxes, bags and baskets were roped down leather-handed giants for days' jolting. And at the end of the nine days' journey over a bone-breaking road. nothing seemed to) have shifted the fraction of an inch and no one but leather-handed carters could have opened the knots. They are great believers in rope.' these men, and a Kansu muleteer will crush in the side of a box made of half inch boards roping it to his pack saddle frames, while a Tibetan drover will rope a round, smooth-bottomed kettle on the of yak for a three months' trip.
The big contract was carefully fulfilled in each item and it was all very convenient and satisfactory, but I learned later that there are cheaper ways of hiring carte. The first and best is to wander into a group of oarsmen and hire them) without the intervention of " hong. The next best innkeeper who is to hire through an} holding carts, mules and indigent carters in pawn for peas and fodder consumed when -|earting was slack. He takes what is owing to him out of your advance! payment and hands the carters the small chanze. Best of all, however, is not to hire them at all.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.