reach the hotel, nor receive that welcome which was so warmly accorded to me by Monsieur Thomas, the proprietor. Thomas was not the cleanest man in the world, but he was extremely polite, which was something. There was, however, about his costume a painful lack of buttons, and its appearance might perhaps have been improved by the addition of a waistcoat, and by the absence of the grease that seemed to have been strug- gling up to reach his hair, but had not arrived at its destination. His hands, and even his face, in prospect of our coming, had been hastily though imperfectly washed. But then he was a cook, too ; and he remarked, when I flattered him on this head, that there was nothing like a little eau-de-vie to enable an artist to put the finishing touches on a chef-d'ceuvre, either of cookery or painting. Had he confessed to a great deal of that stimulant, he would have been much nearer the truth.
My bedroom was not a comfortable one. How could it h^} — it was chiefly built of mud. The mud floor, indeed, was mat- ted over, but the white-washed walls felt sticky, and so did the bed and curtains; a close, nasty smell, too, pervaded the whole apartment, and on looking into a closet, I discovered a quantity of mouldy, foreign apparel. This, as I found out next morning, had been left there as plague-stricken by a gentleman who, some days previously, had nearly died of small-pox in this very room. Fortunately I escaped an attack of the malady.
I paid a visit to the Corean Legation in the Tartar quarter of the city. It was customary before the war for the King of Corea to send an annual embassy of tribute-bearers to Peking. The first detachment of the embassy had just arrived before I quitted the capital. There were but a few members present at the Legation at the time of my visit, and the apartments in which they dwelt were so scrupulously clean that I almost
