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To-morrow I shall have more walking, more thirsting, more tea. China tea, thou art a godsend to the wayfarer in that great land! I endeavored to get the details of the population of the province of Szech'wan, the variability of the reports providing an excellent illustration of the uncertainty impending over everything statistical in China estimates ranged from thirty-five to eighty millions.

The latter is supposed to be one of the most ill-nurtured and desolate provinces of the Empire, mountainous, void of cultivation when compared with Szech'wan, one mass of high hills conditioned now as Nature made them; and the people, too, ashamed of their own wretchedness, are ill-fed and ill-clad.

Yün-nan and Szech'wan and a great part of Kwei-chow in the main still untouched by the increased taxation necessary to provide revenue to uphold the reforms brought about by the forward movement in various parts of the Empire are where the aboriginal population is most evident.

As I gazed admiringly along the miles and miles of ripening wheat and golden rape, pink-flowering beans, interspersed everywhere with the inevitable poppy, swaying gently as in a sea of all the dainty colors of the rainbow, I did not wonder that Szech'wan had been called the Garden of China. Greater or denser cultivation I had never seen.

But the fact that I have lived in North-East Yün-nan for a year and a half, and have traveled from one end of the province to the other, in addition to having come across tribes of people in Szech'wan, may justify me in the eyes of the reader for placing on record my own impressions as a general contribution to this most exciting discussion.

For one full hour they argued at a terrible speed as to the rate of exchange in the Szech'wan large and the Yün-nan small cash, and this was only interrupted when a poor man, deaf and dumb, and of hideous appearance, seeing the foreigner in his contemptible town, rushed in with a carrying pole and felled his grumbling townsman at my feet.

Hundreds passed us on their toilsome journey with tea, lamp-oil, skins, hides, copper, lead, coal and white wax from Yün-nan, and with salt, English cotton, Chinese porcelain, fans and so on from Szech'wan.

However that may be, traveling in China, through a wonderful province like Szech'wan, whose chief entrepôt is fifteen hundred miles from the coast, convinces one that she has come to the parting of the ways. You can, in any city or village in Szech'wan or in Yün-nan, for that matter, in a lesser degree always find the new nationalism in the form of the "New China" student.

"In the independent territory of the Nou-su, to the west of Szech'wan, the term used for God is Eh-nia, and a Nou-su who has much intercourse with the independent people contends that there are three names indicative of God, each representing different functions if not persons of the Godhead. These names are: Eh-nia, Keh-neh, Um-p'a-ma.

Some Szech'wan coolies and myself had rice together on a low form away from the smoke, and the while listened to some tales of old, told by some half-witted, goitrous monster who seemed sadly out at elbow. The soldier meantime smelt round for a smoke. As he and my men had decided a few moments ago that each party was of a very low order of humanity, their pipes for him were not available.