ing customers with ornaments for shrines and food for the gods. The bearer, with cool audacity, proceeded to light his pipe and smoke until he had been paid to remove the cripple. A still worse case was narrated to me by an eye-witness. A silk-mercer had refused to contribute his black-mail, and accord- ingly received a domiciliary visit from a representative of the chief. This intruder had smeared his bare body with mud, and carried a bowl slung with cords and filled with foul water to the very brim. Having taken up his stand in the shop, he commenc- ed to swing this bowl round his head, without indeed spilling a drop of its contents, yet so that, had anyone attempted to arrest his arm, the water would have been distributed in a filthy shower over the silks piled upon the counter and shelves.
But there is still another and a worse class of beggars — outlaws who own allegiance to no prince or power on earth — and these were the men whom I visited and found dwelling in the charnel-houses in a city of the dead. Many of the little huts in this dismal spot were built with brick and roofed with tiles. They contained coffins and bodies placed there to await the favourable hour for interment, when the rites of Fengshui might be duly performed, and the remains laid to rest in some well-situated site where neither wind nor wave would disturb their sacred dust. But poverty, death, distress, or indeed a variety of causes, not infrequently intervene to prevent the surviving relatives from ever choosing this happy site and bringing the final ceremonies to a consummation; and thus the coffins lie forgotten and moulder into dust, and the tombs are invaded by the poor outcasts, who there seek shelter from the cold and rain, creeping gladly to slumber into the dark corners of a sepulchre, and then most happy when they most imitate the dead. On my first visit to this place I recollect being
