“ The soughing of the breeze and the singing of the few birds in the scattered but extensive evergreen forest were joys that one almost forgets in this bare land; for China there were comparatively few people within the enclosure, though trail-roads wandered away in all directions among the trees, with donkey-bells tinkling off into the distance; it was particularly a joy to leave even the trails and walk on grass again, strolling at random on and on, to climb the hills, though this is technically forbidden, since the living commonalty should not look down upon the illustrious dead. ”

“ Some of the street cries are almost musical, even to our Western ears; some hawkers use instruments to spare their voices. The barber twangs what looks like a gigantic pair of tweezers; the knife- and scissor-sharpener blows a long horn or clashes together half a dozen heavy steel pieces carried only for that purpose; the toy-and-candy man has his gong, the china-riveter his swinging bells, the blind man his reed pipe, or his big brass disk, and his long tapping cane, and the water-seller has, of course, his squeaking wheelbarrow. ”

“ There is an atmosphere reminiscent of pioneer America in these broad reaches of Manchuria, so unlike the little diked and flooded paddy-fields of Korea and Japan. Only rarely is there a human being in sight, now and then a lone man in a pigtail and blue denim hoeing corn, or plowing with a thin red ox or a cow. The few houses are as miserable as the huts of Korea, otherwise quite different, being plain and square, thatched with corn- or kaoliang-stalks instead of the hair-smooth rice-straw, and without a suggestion of the picturesque about them. ”

“ The last town in which we were forced to pass a night was a miserable collection of filth and half-baked mud, though rich in grain, stacks covering the flat roofs and surrounding the hard-earth floors on which it was still being threshed; though two brand-new temples gleamed forth from the general ugliness. All next morning a half-witted road, evidently bent on outdoing itself as a fitting climax of the journey, wandered along a wide river valley cut up everywhere not only by the meandering stream itself but by hundreds of irrigation ditches. ”

“ The thought of living not merely on the ground floor but literally on the ground itself, since Peking houses have no cellars and rarely even a single step to be mounted, may seem unthinkable. The total absence of front yards, of grass, of even the suggestion of a sidewalk, nothing but blank walls of bluish-gray mud bricks, here and there half tumbled in, patched perhaps for the time being with old straw mats or mere rubbish, close on either hand as far as the eye can see, is likely to bring a sinking to the new-comer’s heart. ”

“ At weeding-time whole villages join together in great gangs, with drums, fifes, brass cans, and all manner of native noise-producers, to make a festival of the task, singing as they weed. The men, stripped to the waist and burned a permanent brown, display leathery skins that glisten red-brown in the sunshine, like a well polished russet shoe. Yet many a peasant uses a yellow fan as he works. Where irrigation calls for the lifting of water from a ditch to the fields, a man leisurely swings all day long an enormous wooden spoon suspended in a little framework. ”

“ The dreariness, the dismal lifelong existence of the great mass of Chinese seemed only emphasized by such scenes as a pair of blind minstrels entertaining a village by beating together resonant sticks and singsonging endless national ballads or ancient legends. Nothing whatever of the myriad simple enjoyments of more fortunate peoples, not even grass to sit on and trees to sit under, lightens their bare-earth-dwelling lot. ”

“ Nowhere could one open the eyes without seeing soldiers, lounging in unmilitary attitude before guarded gates, lolling about the streets and bazaars with the air of conquerors to whom nothing could be denied, drawn in endless files through the Japanese city on their way to the railway station stretched out at ease in rickshaws among their bed-stuffed possessions and grasping in one hand the rifle with the butt of which the great majority of them probably paid the perspiring coolies so incessantly trotting back and forth with them. ”

“ Even the workman without it, however, is still conspicuous. Tattered, soiled, and sun-scorched men wandering across the country with a kind of tramp’s pack on their backs wear the horsehair bird-cage on their heads; perhaps the most incongruous sight of all is to behold a battered old man of the rice-fields solemnly squatting on a garbage-heap in his mud hamlet, with his opera hat perched on guard above his gray and scanty topknot. ”

“ A visiting-card, as I have said before, has a weight in China out of all keeping with the ease with which any one can have it printed. The fourth hard climb of the trip, up a trench-like trail slippery as new ice from the rain of the day before and almost impassable with pack-animals sprawling and sliding under ungainly burdens, uncovered such a panorama of wrinkled blue mountain ranges entirely around the horizon as even the perpetual wanderer seldom sees equaled. ”

“ There were crazy-shaped fields at every possible height, ragged little hollows that looked exactly like shell-holes, even their tiny bottoms carefully cultivated, threshing-floors throwing up grain like bursts of shrapnel, clusters of farm buildings of the identical color of all the landscape, and always surrounded by high mud walls, a wildly chaotic yet completely tamed land, utterly bare brown, turned golden by the brightest of suns and the clearest of air, with only the faintest purple haze on the far edges of the horizon. ”

“ There are places which only the feet of intrepid and ardent lovers of nature have ever trodden, or, what is still better, ever will, and pinnacles of sharpened rock from the all but unattainable points of which myriads of others like them, yet each utterly different, stretch away in an endless forest of white granite spires among which sunshine and rain and the often swirling mists make new beauties each more beautiful than the last. ”

“ City gates like mammoth office buildings tower above long vistas of lowly human dwellings; lotuses bloom on the lake of the Winter Palace, and the visitor thither is pursued by all but naked mendicants—yao-fan-ti (want-rice-ers) the Chinese call them in their kinder language. Sumptuous private cars stand before most modern buildings, and Peking street-sprinklers, consisting of two men and a bucket, with a long-handled wooden dipper, attempt to lay the dust about them. ”

“ The croak of the oil-man suggests some superannuated frog; the jolly old fellow who peddles Chinese wine from a beautiful copper urn has a succession of hoarse shouts that never vary; the cabbage-man, the peanut-man, the delicatessen wagon, so to speak, even the rag-picking women, all have their own cries, distinctive, yet unintelligible until one has learned them by rote rather than by meaning, as Peking did generations ago. Even we dull-eared adults know nearly all of them now, and are conscious of something missing if they fail to come at the usual hour, which is a rare lapse indeed. ”

“ South-bound freight-trains were not only crowded with Chinese soldiers, gambling amid the chaotic messiness that surrounded them in their roofed cars, but the uncovered flat-cars loaded with their paraphernalia, with car-wheels and rusted machinery, were crowded with Russian women and children sleeping on makeshift nests in sunshine or heavy rain. There were cattle-cars with barefooted Russian men tending them, little European box-cars fitted up as homes, sometimes with a still aristocratic-looking young woman suckling a babe in the center of it, impertinent Chinese soldiers looking on. ”

“ The East and the West are so unlike that an American could die of Chinese food and living conditions while his jailers were priding themselves, in their ignorance of other lands, on giving him the best the world affords. Of course Japan is an example of the abolishing of extraterritoriality; but even there the foreigner by no means gets Western justice, and for all the virtues and likable qualities of the Celestial and the often disagreeable traits of the Nipponese, government in Japan is ideal compared to the corrupt, chaotic travesty on it which rules China. ”

“ The unpromising route was dense with traffic,—long trains of camels haughtily treading past, strings of ox-carts with the solid, heavily riveted wheels indigenous to China, patient-faced mules and donkeys carefully picking their way through acres of tumbled stones, throngs of cheery, unbelligerent Chinese in blue denims, 110mingled here and there with a more hardy, weather-beaten, hard-faced Mongol, a stray soldier perhaps, with an ancient gun slung over his sheepskin-clad shoulder, or a robust lama in filthy quilted garments that had once been red or yellow. ”

“ The result is that a road is a homeless orphan, welcome nowhere, driven from field to field, and ruthlessly done away with by plow or shovel whenever an opportunity offers. The attempts of each of China’s myriad tillers of the soil to chase the un-public highway off his own precious little patches of earth, added to the fact that a driver has only a limited control over the wanderings of his lead-mule, and has no training in directness and time-saving himself, make the average Chinese road the most incredible example of aimless wandering on the face of the earth. ”

“ Surely the city that was for centuries the chief Manchu stronghold of the west, almost their second capital, which had welcomed the cantankerous old dowager fleeing before the justifiable wrath of the Western world, which had seen such cruel and unnecessary bloodshed during the birth of the republic, which had so often been the outpost on the edge of a great Mohammedan rebellion, might at least have had some faint thrill, some little hint of hidden danger, left to cheer up the jaded wanderer. ”

“ These sharp-tired, two-wheeled contrivances are magnificently designed for ruining a road, particularly one built merely of earth, in the shortest possible time, and the result of the trespassing of even the few thousand we passed during the one day can readily be imagined. Then there were many spots where the Chinese genius for never repairing anything until repair is absolutely unavoidable manifested itself, and here and there some farmer had frankly chopped the highway in two to make a passage for his irrigation-ditch, a privilege as time-honored as China’s written language. ”

“ It takes a bit more courage to jolt out to Tung-ling, the Eastern Mausoleum, a generation older and twice as far away; but there pine-clad hills and rather gentle yet impressive scenery make up for the somewhat less expansive tombs. Then, too, those whose interests are not entirely in the past may wish to run out on the branch line to Fushun, where the Japanese are taking out—by the use of economical Chinese muscle—vast quantities of coal from an open cut that goes down into the earth in steps, like a dry-dock prepared for some mammoth ship many times larger than any sea has ever floated. ”

“ The general desertion of their stations looked, however, more like the contented retirement of craftsmen whose wants were amply satisfied by a part-day’s exertion. They sat off the trail against sunny rocks or beneath an occasional evergreen, or about the mouths of their huts and caves, gossiping, quarreling, scratching, and otherwise heartily enjoying themselves, especially sleeping in their grass-floored nests, scorning to exert themselves even to the extent of a pleading word or glance at likely passers-by. ”