Save on this one day of festival our living quarters. are absolutely quiet. Only the soft footed ser vants enter and no sound penetyates, but the song of the spring near which we are lodged. Hosts and guests, we each have a little house to ourselves. This is the Chinese way of building, in seps rate pavilions. It is a" universal principle of their architecture and applies equally to monasteries palaces, and the dwellings of sim folk. Sometimes these pavilions stand around stone paved court yards, sonictimes they are scattered through a garden. At the "Great
used. Our' sitting room, for Awaker both methods are stance, is in a formal court on Mat our bedrooms ground; are in a Tittle yard of its own with sheltering trees. Nowhere else in the world is there a system which the same senso of intimacy to the tame sense of privacy. Ite only drawback is great extravagance of ground space.
Each pavilion is divided into two rooms by a carved wooden pattition; or a blind, round window set in solid panelling, The smaller halt es ax a bed alcove, the larger at sitting room. Both have uvate sitting room. Both have Paper windows protected by a wooden trellis. The paper is 20 pasted that sides and bottom are left loose thus forming flaps which may be rolled up to admit air, and sare held in place by a spider web of fine string. Incredible as it seems to us the tough paper keeps out the cold better than glass. The priest keeps his flowers in a paper bhat-house all winter and they thrive quite as well as in our elaborate conservatories, Our doors are also papered, with 1 small wooden panel at the bottom for the sake of solidity. In this panel a hole iggcut to let the cat in and out, auf' in winter pussy's door is covered with a waded the intelligent creature) learns to push aside. It is sigaificant that there are no locks. No are needed. The entire temple compound is surrounded by a high brick wall and the outer gate is closed at night and barred wooden bolt. Two watchdogs, scraggy creatures rather like Alaskan huskies, with dispositions that are a curious mixture of fierceness and craven timidity, guard the monastery. But our real. security. is the inherent honesty of the peasants, Robbery among them is almost unknown. We leave everything open and-our rings on the long carved table that serves as a bureau. Nothing is ever disturbed except by our own red setter pup who occasionally swallows a table napkin or gnaws a book, or by the high winds that! sweep over the plain and seatter our papers. When the latter come rush. ing down from the distant. Mongo-_ Tian desert we close our doors and barricade them with two little stone lions that stand on our row verandah. They are quaint! Creatures, little decorative freaks, chips of the imagination of some forgotten artist with a droll sense of humour. One is fat with a'stolid We have named them after two members of our Diplomatic Corps. Everybody sees the resemblance, even the gentlemen in question, and they are generally. known in our Peking "toy community" as the "joke lions.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.