Starting at dawn from the gate of a city as old as Rome itself, the pot for seven miles of my journey, lay through a vast necropolis.
Such a beginning as that, now, might introduce something truly romantic; but one has nothing of that particular description to re-Jate. The literal facts, however, are striking enough for some observetians thereon.
Hanyang was a barony at least as far back as the founding of Rome, and probably antedates the conversion of the fortress of Jebus into the city of Jerusalem. Its western countryside boasts of a tomb kept lovingly in repair since the days of Philip of Macedon; and there is another quite near the West Gate, of the times of Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra.
Since the rise of the mart of Hankow, in the 14th century, until quite recently, the governing Jaw-courts were in Hanyang. And though Hanyang no longer exercises authority over the living populace of that great city, it beckons them to its western suburbs later, as though with the ery that formed the text of Huxley's sublime poem on Teunyson's funeral (the voice of the Abbey, he meant it to be: "Bring me -your dead."
Tau Great Necrorouts, So there the graves lie, in their countless profusion, between the Han and a long chain of lakes, for a stretch of seven miles, and breadth of three -or four in some parts, Surely, one of the largest graveyards of the world! The word!
necropolis' seems more appropropriate than ' cemetery," for to the traveller the "remains" seem too dead to be ghostly at all; though a newly translated word for "cemetery" ($683) appears some miles out on a new portal of a Cantonese burial-plot.
My solitary tramp along this highway, however, was not a melancholy one. My errand was to pay a New Year's visit to some hearty Chinese friends, 14 miles beyond the last of the '"Hankow" graves. And throughout the first seven miles the genial sunlight, doubly bright after the snows of the actual New Year fell on strings of folks dressed in their best, from whose baskets or loosely-tied bundles there peeped out congratulatory gifts.
One can understand the countryfolk's love of bright colours st this time of the year. Even a Western eye feels positively grateful to every woman and child whose dress flashes out brightly from the wide expanse of dull russet land scape.
Piayine ay Parabise Then, at New Year, these farmers among the graves, no less than others, decorate their doorways, and their speech, too, as though in 'a "garden of delights." True, it! is but playing at Paradise, but the game is worth playing, at least once in 12 months.
The commonest of the numerous doorway mottoes declare that:—
Things are gloria Men heroic and earth prolific at this time. it clouds greet the radiant sun ys accumulates in the new spring ti Rivers and hills form a myriad.year realm; Heaven and earth make one springtide home. old lady of the West once issited a cemetery, read the many epitaphs, and exclaimed: "Than, where are the bad folks buried Here there are no epitaphs to read. But reading the red paper {scrolls, one might well exclaim: Wher" then is the rotten govern-iment of China about which we have heard so much?"—ay, the rottenness thereof complete as that of desaying corpses, which has ruined every past dynasty of China eventually.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.