garçons. The sleepy looking Douanier, with baggy trousers and képi, the grass-grown cobbled streets, the dark blue enamelled plates at the street-corners, with Rue de la Republique, Rue de Paris, &c., thereon in large white letters, the general air of stagnation and idleness among the population, seemed to carry one in a moment over leagues and leagues of land and sea to some quiet provincial town in far-away France. It needed not the tricolor floating from the mainmast of the ironclad anchored mid-stream, off the Consulate, to tell us that we were no longer on English ground.

The Shanghai bund and esplanade on a fine afternoon was amusing enough, and we whiled away many a pleasant half-hour watching the motley crowd that assemble there for a ride or drive in the cool of the evening. Here might be seen every grade of colonial society, from the solemn and portly merchant and his family rolling solemnly along in an English-built landau, to the San Francisco demi-mondaine, all powder and patches, dashing about in a Victoria drawn by a pair of pulling, tearing Mongolian ponies. Europeans in buggies and on horseback, Japanese in rikshaws, Chinese in wheelbarrows (the reader may smile, but this is a public conveyance in Shanghai), crowds of every conceivable nation and colour strolling under the trees by the water’s edge, the esplanade at Shanghai on a fine evening is a sight to see and remember.

At night electric lights every twenty yards or so convert the bund into a perfect fairyland. The inauguration of the Jablokoff system, however, was attended with a slight contretemps. Crowds of natives and Europeans turned out the first night to see the effect, but for a good hour none was apparent. The place was wrapped in total darkness, and the expectant crowd beginning to show signs of impatience, it was found that the engineer had fixed the lights above the trees, whence the dense foliage very naturally obscured it, instead of under. This trifling mistake was, however, soon rectified, and the brilliant illumination so took the fancy of the natives that all the principal Chinese thoroughfares are now lit by it.

The native city of Shanghai, is walled and separated from the French and English settlements by a deep, muddy moat. Some clumsy iron cannon, said to be the oldest in existence, are mounted upon its dilapidated grass-grown battlements. This was our first experience of a celestial city, and we did not, after visiting it, look forward with unalloyed pleasure to the two hundred odd miles of country we were about to traverse between Pekin and the Great Wall of China. But I did not then know that Shanghai is renowned as being the dirtiest city in the Chinese Empire, and certainly we never afterwards came across one to equal it in this respect. Pekin itself was a paradise in comparison.

The streets of Shanghai proper are none of them more than ten feet in breadth. Some are even considerably narrower, and the tottering, tumble-down dwellings, the majority built of wood, bend forward on either side until they nearly touch overhead. The thoroughfares are thus always, even on the brightest day, in a state of semi-darkness. The pavements, rough and uneven, are formed of huge stone slabs, some of them, judging by the characters inscribed thereon, many hundreds of years old. Worn away by time and use, many are broken away in parts, revealing underneath the sewage and filth of years, which, slowly rotting away, infects the whole city with a hot, sickly odour of putrefaction. It was a hot, muggy day when we visited it, and the stench from these places was something beyond description. I was not surprised to hear that cholera and typhus number their victims by thousands at times, and that an epidemic (of some sort or another) always exists.

Yet it seemed a busy, bustling place, and we could scarcely make our way along the sloppy streets for the continuous stream of traffic. It was exactly like a human bee-hive, and we should very soon have lost ourselves without a guide in the crooked, tortuous streets that ran in all directions like a maze, without any regard to regularity or order. We came suddenly in the very heart of the city, upon an oasis in this desert of filth and squalor, a space about a quarter of a mile square. A large circular lake overhung with weeping willows occupied the centre. Great white and yellow lilies lay here and there on the surface of the smooth clear water, in which one could see the gold fish swimming lazily to and fro about the thick green weeds and stems, ten or fifteen feet deep. About fifty yards from the shore, and connected with it by a light bamboo bridge, stood a large pagoda gorgeous in vermilion and gold, with countless little gilt bells hung around the roof, which, with every breath of air gave out a sweet, musical jangle. Seated in this were a crowd of men and women, talking, laughing, and drinking tea. All were dressed in the richest silks, the men in dark blue or plum colour, the women in lighter shades of green, heliotrope, or orange, their necks and arms loaded with heavy gold ornaments, their quaint, impassive, doll-like faces thickly smeared with paint. On the banks around the lake were booths for the sale of sweetmeats, fans, silks, cigarettes, and jewellery, while jugglers and acrobats plied their trade among the busy crowd, or at the little tables set out by the waterside and occupied by noisy chattering tea-drinkers. I stood for some time watching the curious scene, which was for all the world like a bit broken out of a willow-pattern plate. It seemed so odd to walk suddenly out of the filthy, sewage-laden streets into this hidden corner of cleanliness and picturesque revelry. But China is full of such contradictions. I afterwards discovered that we had strayed into a tea-garden (there are a dozen such in the city) and that the pretty pagoda was used as a kind of private box for the better classes, just as our own smart people at home occasionally patronize the Alhambra and other music-halls to gaze at a respectful distance on the manners and customs of the “Oi Polloi.”

The Chinese, I found, are great believers in the art of fortune-telling. We passed on our way homewards many of the shops, or rather boxes, in which the professors of the art received their subjects. They seemed to have many methods, but the favourite one consists in dipping the thumb into a piece of hot, soft, black wax, and then impressing it firmly upon a piece of parchment or white wood. The lines thus obtained are supposed to predict the future. The professors seemed to be doing a roaring trade. Their fees were not extortionate; a couple of cash (about ½d.) each consultation.

The most important thing we now had to consider was the purchase of stores for our journey over the “Great Hungry Desert,” as Gobi is called by the Chinese. It was by no means easy to decide how much or how little to take, for no one in Shanghai seemed to know whether in the eight hundred odd miles lying between the Great Wall of China and Ourga food of any sort or kind was procurable. However, hearing that everything in the way of provisions was outrageously dear at Tientsin, and unprocurable at Pekin, we decided to lay in our stock at Shanghai, and curiously enough furnished ourselves with exactly the right amount, for our stores failed the very day before we reached Kiakhta. The claret, whisky, and soda-water gave out some time before, but we had plenty of