Stripped country, shrunken as a beggar's heart, No martyred patriot's bed this. Not a single victim on his native soil. Conquest and oblivion, that's all. An odd visitation came our way during the night. There were quite a number of Chinese laborers spread out on the deck up in the bow, returning to Tientsin. When the morning broke, two of them were found dead - from natural causes. It was a most extraordinary proceeding to an Occidental mind to see their companions gather them up like so much merchandise, bend them double, and wrap them up in their quilts and then tie them securely with ropes so they could be carried: all done in the space of about two minutes. I happened to be on deck with my camera at the time and saw the last few moments of these hasty obsequies. No burial at sea for the Chinaman. They take him back and lay him away in his own home town where the code of ancestor-worship preserves his memory to posterity. Owing to the great quantities of silt which both the Yellow and the Peiho Rivers have emptied into the Gulf of Pechili for countless centuries, it is possible for an ocean steamer to approach the land only at high tide, and not even then if heavily loaded; while ten to twelve miles offshore the discolored water discharged by these rivers can be seen pushing its way out into the sea. Our comparatively small steamer had no trouble, however, and at eleven o'clock we passed the two Chinese forts at Taku, guarding the mouth of the Peiho. One would hardly think that these insignificant-looking, low-lying fortifications, with their foundations sunk in solid embankments of mud and millet stalks, contained modern batteries. Deep ditches or moats guard the rear entrance to both, 'to keep the soldiers from straying away,' as the celebrated Viceroy Li Hung Chang once put it, with more truth than satire. Tientsin is only twenty-five miles distant from the Taku landing if you use the railway. If you take the river route, the distance is sixty miles, from which you may gather the serpentine character of the Peiho. All luggage is transferred to the railway at Tongku, three or four miles up the river from Taku landing. It is a mighty fearsome experience to watch the proceeding, with tendencies toward heart failure and nervous prostration. A mob of yelling coolies officiate. A running noose of rope at the end of a hoisting cable is dropped down the hatchway. In a minute you see four or five trunks (your own included) coming slowly upwards while the carelessly looped noose which encircles them is slipping inch by inch toward the end of one of the trunks. And just as they are dangling over the ten feet of water between the vessel and the lighter below and another moment will see them all overboard, the whole outfit falls on the lighter's deck, quite safe from a watery grave. Yes it was much more interesting to watch than the 'hogtying' of the dead coolies. When we reached the riverbank at Tongku, there were at least six coolies to each one of the three of us, doing their best to wrench our small bags out of our hands and carry them to the station, about fifty yards distant. Pandemonium and confusion worse confounded. There was nothing to do but yield — the discretion that is the better part of valor. We caught the next train for Peking where we arrived at 5 P.M. We had been warned in Kyoto that there was a revolution going on in China. When we saw every railway station guarded by soldiers, we believed it. Fortunately, however, the outbreak was confined to the country farther south, around Nanking and Hankow. We were undisturbed in the northern capital. Our decks are rotting with the slime of ages, JOHN ANDERSON, R.N.R. It's a perfectly safe thing to refer to Peking, China's capital, as the oldest city in the world. The likelihood of any one taking issue with the statement is quite limited. Its history can be traced back to the twelfth century before Christ. That's old enough to suit the most captious critic. The real interesting feature of this most ancient of all cities is the fact that it is still there, with a population approximating two millions. Still doing business at the same old stand and in accordance with the methods that prevailed prior to the Christian era. If such a thing as a slogan for Peking or for China at large could be imagined, it would probably run something like this: 'What was good enough for our ancestors is good enough for us.' The white man is as much of a 'foreign devil' to-day as he was when he forced his way into the Flowery Kingdom in 1860. And it's a fair statement that he will not be less so a century hence. Four hundred millions of people are a bit unwieldy. In China they are the very quintessence of inertia. Assuming for the sake of argument that there's the slightest excuse for the use of such a word as 'regeneration' in connection with the Yellow Empire, all historians are agreed that such a condition can never be brought about from without, or through foreign intervention of any kind. The only hope is that there may be a suffi cient number of young Chinese educated in foreign countries who will be willing to return home and sacrifice themselves in the almost hopeless job of awakening their sodden brethren, first of all to a real interest in life, rousing them out of that dumb stupidity against which even the gods are powerless. As the Reverend Dr. Arthur H. Smith, who spent a quarter of a century in missionary work in China, puts it, in his altogether admirable book 'Chinese Characteristics': 'It would be easy to raise in China an army of a million men nay, of ten millions-tested by competitive examination as to their capacity to go to sleep across three wheelbarrows, with head downward like a spider, their mouths wide open, and a fly inside.' Impossible as it may seem to the Occidental mind, it is a melancholy fact that the longer a man stays in China the less he feels he knows about the native character. Of all Orientals, the Chinese is the most remarkable combination of craftiness and stupidity, industry and laziness, indifference and hostility, honesty and crookedness, intelligence and superstition, filth and luxury. He is entirely lacking in 'soul,' pity, or altruism. He's the alien of aliens. He swings uncertainly between admiration for the teachings of Confucius and the lowest depths of depravity. Metaphorically speaking, and with a harmless attempt at generalization, this yellow gentleman has been conceived in sin, born in iniquity, built by contract, and rejected by the nations of the earth because he was not up to specifications. Incidentally, he's the most accomplished, dyed-in-the-wool grafter that ever lived, moved, or had his being on this mundane sphere. That condition holds good from the Emperor's throne that was, down through the various grades of public service to the most humble and scum-of-theearth coolie in the lowest slums of Peking or Canton. And he glories in his shame. He cares not a tinker's damn for - and he your opinion and wishes you'd stay home. Take it from me - he's worth going a long distance to see shines in Peking. Fearing lest you may gather from my characterization of our old friend John Chinaman that Peking would be a good place to avoid - let me say that it is, beyond all peradventure, the most colorful, picturesque, original, and highly interesting city in the Far East. There are two excellent hotels: Hôtel des Wagon Lits and Grand Hôtel de Peking, both on the American plan. The rates are not cheap by any means, but you'd pay them ten times over in preference to putting up at a native hostelry. And-expense is not a good argument for staying away from either the hotel or the country that you should visit on such a trip as this. Peking was an afterthought in our itinerary. It turned out to be the brightest one of the ten months' pilgrimage. For some reason, the traveler planning a 'round-the-world trip rarely thinks of including China, with the possible exception of Hong Kong. And Hong Kong is not China by any manner of means. When you get to Japan and begin looking the ground over, you'll find that a little journey to Peking, Shanghai, and Canton is a very simple thing, easy of access and can be made with the same degree of comfort and luxury as if you were traveling in the United States. That sounds rather large but it's a fact. If we had it to do over again, we should cut out any other country except India in order to include China. The first thing that catches the traveler's eye as he approaches this great city is its towering wall- thirty miles in circumference and enclosing an area of twenty-five square miles. It was built by Kublai Khan, the founder of the Mongol Dynasty in China, in the thirteenth century. Yes it's quite a sizable metropolis. When you climb to the top of the wall, within which the various legations are |