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My kind, devoted friends were fearful lest the innkeeper would have turned me out into the roadway to die the foreigner's spirit would haunt the place for ever and a day were I allowed to die inside. But I recovered. It was a graver, older, less exuberant walker across China that presently arose from his flea-ridden bed of sickness, and began to make a languid personal introspection.

During the night the moments throbbed away as I lay on my flea-ridden couch moments which seemed long as hours, and no gleaming rift broke the settled and deepening blackness of my hateful environs. Every thing and every place was full of the wearisome, depressing, beauty-blasting commonplace of Interior China.

"I will post thee in the railroad stations," continued the doctor, implacably; "I will bid my patients to write letters to all their friends, warning them against thy flea-ridden Del Mondo; I will apprise the steamboat companies at Genoa and Naples. Thou shalt see what comes of it, truly, thou shalt see."

Two or three times a week a sort of Italian eil-wagen, a funereal and tumble-down, flea-ridden coach, with windows boarded up so high that, when seated, you cannot see out of them, and closed hermetically, after Italian fashion, shambles along at jog-trot pace between the two towns, and takes a livelong day, from early morning to late at night, to perform the journey.

They dodged as if he had thrown a brick, and hurried their prisoners away to the cold, flea-ridden, stone calaboose of the town, where in all probability they lay several months before their case was even called up; while the manager and I ascended to his veranda and flower-grown residence and sat down to a several course dinner served by a squad of solemn servants.

He had passed several seasons in captivity in one of the settlements far south of the Quah-Davic Valley. Afterwards, he had served an unpleasant term in a flea-ridden travelling menagerie, from which a railway smash-up had given him release at the moderate cost of the loss of one eye.