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That is, we are doing all this in the personalities of those holiday companions, who generously found the cage as wide and high as their chair-men wished, and gratefully gloated upon its pelicans and storks and cranes and swans and wild geese and wood-ducks and curlews and sea-pigeons, and gulls, and whatever other water-fowl soars and swims.

That I might have nothing to divert me from my Studies, and to avoid the Noises of Coaches and Chair-men, I have taken Lodgings in a very narrow Street, not far from Whitehall; but it is my Misfortune to be so posted, that my Lodgings are directly opposite to those of a Jezebel. I have seen more than six Persons at once from their several Windows observing the Jezebel I am now complaining of.

Enormous loads were borne along on the large flat-bottomed freight barrow, while on every hand we saw substantial looking farmer folk, men, women, and children, going to town in the same primitive fashion. To save the journey a little for my chair-men, and also for the fun of a new experience, I bargained with a barrow-man to carry me for a few miles.

Crossing the river in ferry boats propelled by sails and oars, the tourists found donkeys, boys, chair-men, lunch carriers, guides, and extra men crowding the western shore. We had hardly landed when the donkey boys surrounded us, gesticulating, shouting the merits of themselves and their beasts, and pleading that their donkeys might be selected.

Between eight o'clock and midnight one optician in Jones'-Fall Street made his fortune by the sale of opera-glasses. Midnight arrived, and the enthusiasm showed no signs of diminution. It spread equally among all classes of citizens men of science, shopkeepers, merchants, porters, chair-men, as well as "greenhorns," were stirred in their innermost fibres. A national enterprise was at stake.

When at last the play was ended, we forced our way through the departing crowd so as to arrive almost with the first upon the scene of waiting footmen, shouting drivers, turbulent chair-men, clamorous boys with dim lanterns or flaming torches, and such attendants upon the nightly emptying of a playhouse.

When we started from Yunnan-fu our caravan was made up of thirteen coolies, six chair-men, six baggage-carriers, and a "fu t'ou," or head coolie, whose duty it was to keep the others up to their work, to settle disputes, or to meet any difficulty that arose. In short, he was responsible both to me and to the hong for the carrying-out of the contract which had been duly agreed upon.

My chair-men came over triumphantly, and Mercury almost ran with his baskets, but the interpreter was glad of the fu t'ou's aid, and two of the coolies balked, but were helped out by some of the others. Later in the day we left the river, and crossing a head ridge or pass affording beautiful views to the south, came out after a time in the same valley, but now wider and more open.

For a few miles we kept up the left bank of the Ta Tu, and then turned abruptly up the mountain-side. Here my chair-men halted for breakfast and I did not see them again until we reached our night's stopping-place. Alone with Jack I kept on along the steep trail, revelling in my freedom.

While we were waiting, two chair-men came with their vehicle and set it down at one side of the door, and a few boys and women gathered in the hope of obtaining sixpence by some service of which a player might perchance be in need on issuing forth.