Peking, as most people know. 1 lies in a semicircle of mountains that rise range by range to the Mongol plateau on the North and fon the edge of the great North China plain that extends to the Yangtze River, One of the city's manifold charms is that Tt has not been very long—only a few centuries, which are nothing in Chinese chronotogy—since these bare, brown and rather forbidding hills, were clothed in magnificent fororts. All the old accounts of Peking describe the "Kingdom of Before there were motor roads netting the Peking countryside, Jong before there was a railway to Mentoukou and the coal mines, it was the fashion among the pioneer diplomats to spend their summers in the hills, lodging in temples surrounded by cool groves of "ho tail" pines," white barked pines, Junipers, cedars, ginkes and many other less i but equally welcome trees. Pa'Ta Ch'u, a group of eight temples in a ravine which used to carry a stream of clear cold water, and where there are now two hotels and sometimes as_many as 300 motor cars on a Sunday parked in front of them, was a favourite resort of the Lega: tion folk and of a few veteran missionaries long before the Boxer Year. It was then an adventure a__ bright, clear winter's day you. can stand at many points in the heart of the town and, looking both Wert and North, view ranges of snowcapped mountains which the new: comer would swear were only a mile or from the city walls, The near ext are ten miles from the contre of the city and some that you see are 40 pr 50 miles away, but in the crystal air of this northern country
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.