One of the most marked impressions of my life was made by a trip through Manchuria 32 years ago—the thundering carts, the indescribably bad roads, and the lean, imperious mule. All the way from Antung to Mukden was a highway of protruding rocks, quagmires and swimming mud-flats. 1 think of the journey uow as a wild struggle with primeval nature. Something—of the air and atmosphere it had of a modern cubist picture, wher@ men look like tree stumps and horses like old camel-hair furniture.
The inns, too, were of a flavour quite their own. We, who sat_on tne kong, floated in an '"'inarticulate element'' of acrid smoke, while down on the hard level of tha ground floor lived the innkeeper, his dogs, his pigs, his chickens. Ao companying the general state of confusion were to be seen here and thave a guest leaning on his elbow engaged in rolling a wad of opium that he kneaded and kneaded, dipping it occasionally into the flame of a lamp hard by. After' an endless amount of preparatory work he puts it on the fiat bowl of his pipe and draws, as for dear life, through a large bamboo stem, enormous whiffs that go deep' down into the lungs and then lazily exhale themselves from eyes, ears, and chin. Whither had the weird soul of the smoker wended, wondered. Did his face indicate anything of the world he was seeing? Were his dreams of fat pork, most unpalatable; '"Johnnie" cake unsalted and unseasoned; a fiery kang papered by insect proboscis; or was he in heaven with the Western Queen Mother drinking nectar by the Lake of Gems, or tossing peaches and apricots into the cap of the fairies.
That journey I shall never forget. Pigtails were everywhere; *,000.000 strong, each two and a half feet in length, making, in alt, if joined together, 3,000 miles of comet sweep across Manchuria. Gone, alas, they are with the might of Russia, Germany and all other imperial trappings.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.