face'' of mine host. Some of the dishes were really excellent
and as a rule all were well-cooked, although the oil in which
much of the food was steeped made it rather greasy. My digestive
apparatus is pretty good, but it would take a copper-
lined stomach to partake without disaster of a typical Chinese
feast. But for that matter so it would to eat a traditional New
England dinner of boiled salt pork, corned beef, cabbage, turnips,
onions and potatoes, followed by a desert of mince pie
and plum pudding and all washed down by copious draughts
of hard cider.

Chinese inns do not impoverish even the economical traveller.
Our bill for our tiffin stop was usually 100 small cash, a little
more than three cents, for our entire party of about a score of
men and animals. For the night, the common charge was 700
cash, twenty-three cents. Travellers are expected to provide
their own food and bedding and to pay a small extra sum for
the rice and fodder used by their servants and mules, but even
then the cost appears ridiculously small to a foreigner. Still,
the most thoroughly seasoned traveller can hardly consider a
Chinese inn a comfortable residence. It is simply a rough,
one-story building enclosing an open courtyard. The rooms
are destitute of furniture except occasionally a rude table. The
floor is the beaten earth, foul with the use of scores and perhaps
hundreds of years. The windows are covered with oiled
paper which admits only a dim light and no air at all. The
walls are begrimed with smoke and covered with cobwebs.
Across the end of the room is the inevitable kang--a brick platform
under which the cooking fire is built and on which the
traveller squats by day and sleeps by night. The unhappy