prove a sore puzzle to our trooper or man of the ranks. Four of them, standing at the angles of a square, will pitch a half-hundred weight each to the man on his left, who seizing it by the grasping bar before it finds the ground, heaves it to his neighbour, and ten or fifteen minutes will be spent at this manly exercise, and the weight never touch the clay. He is personally brave, and his inferiority to an English, Irish, Scotch, or French man is owing to imperfect arms, bad discipline, and want of interest in the cause of strife. Passing a better sort of cottage on the way, ten or twelve of these warriors, naked to the waist, turned out, and paid their respects to the little party with every appearance of good feeling. The route lay partly at the foot of a range of hills, and the scenery and condition of the roads varied considerably as they proceeded. They would now be laboriously struggling through mud, and wet, and ruts; now hid by the profuse vegetation on each side; now enjoying from a narrow hard road, winding round an eminence, a fine view, embracing hill scenery, villages shaded by large walnut trees, and the winding course of one of the nine rivers that fall into the two gulfs between the Peiho and the seaextremity of the Great Wall. They were particularly delighted with the landscape near Lanchow, presenting a conical hill with a temple on top, the town itself, some Irish-looking cabins, and the river with its numerous craft floating gaily upon its current.

white, and embroidered with a profusion of animals, winged and otherwise, two carefully dressed bows of hair at each side of the head, the plaited back-hair dangling behind, and an ungraceful thick-soled pair of shoes.

During their progress through Mantchuria they saw several women having undeformed feet, but they were only exceptions to the prevailing horrible custom. The wives and daughters of peasants and farmers value the unsightly appendages equally with ladies, who, to use an Irishism, do nothing but drink tea and make curtsies. Mr. Fleming once witnessed the unbandaging and displaying of one of the golden lilies," and did not recover some time. Of all the toes except the big one, there remained but white seams formed on the sole, where they were bent down in childhood. The instep had been ulcerated and disfigured in the process, and all below the knee was as shrunk and deformed as Richard III.'s arm.

66

for

In the south of China some houses of two storeys are to be met with, but along our travellers' route they found none but one-storeyed buildings. Some attribute this usage to a feeling of respect towards the temples, others to the inconvenience "a getting up stairs" would cause to the

66

golden lilies." Generally the interiors are destitute of ornament. The concave and convex tiled roofs receive all the attention that can be spared. John Chinaman is much Near this town Mr. Fleming lost occupied with the present. He his heart to a Chinese, more proba- would not, even if blessed with a bly, Tartar beauty, as her feet, though Nile and convenient quarries, ever sinall, had not undergone the horrible think of hewing out immense blocks process to which those of most of stone, extracting gigantic images Chinese women are subjected. He from them, and rafting them down devotes three pages of the thick octavo stream. He makes a clay joss, volume to a record of her charms burns incense before it, perhaps sets little enough in a novel, but rather it in a road side sanctuary, rings the too much in a sober book of bell depending from a tree to warn travels, especially as her forehead his god that he is going to perform and neck were plastered with his devotions, walks off with a clear white, and her cheek and under conscience, the duty being done, and lip with red pigment. It is several if his idol comes to grief, gets anoyears since that which was distin- ther constructed at little expense. guished by our lune de miel, so pass- He makes the most of every transing over charins of eyes, mouth, action, and practises a wise economy and other features, we trouble our on all occasions. He probably has readers to remember only the lower charge of swine in a muddy district, edge of a pair of pink trousers, a where he is obnoxious to heavy loose robe of blue silk, bound with showers. He thatches himself with

VOL. LXII.-CCCLXVII.

7

a cloak of rushes, wears a hat
broader than a sieve, discards stock-
ings, and thus despises the heaviest
shower. He prefers in his house-
walls wood and perishable brick to
stone, which, if lasting longer, would
for the moment be more expensive.
He cannot go to the expense of
paving, lighting, and sewering his
muddy suburbs, nor pay the scaven-
No; he
ger for going his rounds.
gives the run of the streets to a
famished race of dogs and pigs, who
do the duty of the Galinazo vultures
in South American cities, and the
dogs of Constantinople. He can
scarcely afford an inviolable asylum
to the mortal remains of his father
and mother: depositing them in his
gardens, he even turns his ancestors
to account. Dirty John!

People of little or no faith, either in England or China, are proverbially subject to abject superstitious fears. The Chinese master of the house will not have one door facing another, in order that the haunting demon may have the more trouble in his exits and entrances. If his house faces the end of a lane, he inserts a brick in the wall with a charm engraved thereon, to resist the evil issuing from the opening. He gets fiercelooking genii painted on each half of his door, to frighten away other illdisposed genii. His master-charm is. a pair of tadpoles (one black, the other white) inscribed in a circle, one interior waving curve forming an outline for both. This is surrounded by eight series of short flat rulers, three in each some whole, some divided. All these are supposed to be emblematic of the active and passive principles in nature, and very powerful.

The Pharisees were not more interested in the appearance of holy inscriptions on their forehead-bands and their door-posts than the Chinaman in the exhibition of “longevity" and good-luck" on his eaves, his garments, and other convenient places, the words being supposed to have the force of a charm.

In his dress, and its variations in hot and cold weather, the Chinaman deserves imitation by the outer barbarians. White or blue cotton is the ordinary material in summer heat, and a sort of loose net-work, interposing between the skin and the out

side light garb, affords great comfort by allowing a circulation of air over the surface of the skin. You will see a thin, wiry man increasing in bulk from the first chill of incipient winter, till he becomes own brother to Falstaff by the time the cold is at its worst. At its first relaxation he commences to thin his dress, till there is nothing between himself and the sun but the net and the thin robe of calico. Winter and summer his neck is bare, which saves him from the visitations of bronchial affections.

Some opium smoking was witnessed by Mr. Fleming at Tien-Tsin, and on his journey. He observed all its stages, from the simple expression of content on the features to that of the highest beatitude, and then the dazed and stupified state, ending in insensibility. He deplores the custom, but looks on the boisterous behaviour of our own drunkards, and the confusion they cause, as much worse than the solitary self-enjoyment of the victim of opium.

The Lien-Wha--water-lily, (Faba Egyptica, or Lotus), is as much prized by the Chinese as by the ancient Egyptians. They eat the roots raw or boiled; also the seeds. The beautiful plant is found in all pictures where Buddha is represented. It is sacred to Fo in China, as it was to Osiris and Isis in Egypt, being looked on as emblematic of nature in the Pantheistic sense.

It was gratifying to see all along the route, on both sides, such unceasing and never-tiring industry; but no more sign of improvement in the fashion of the implements or the modes of labour than in the days of Confucius..

"For the first time we saw the ploughthat primitive wooden implement of Chinese industry, constructed by the traditional Shin-Nong, the second Chinese emperor, some two and a half thousand years before the Christian era, and probably as simple and rude as he left it, with the beam and single handle or shaft, the wooden share, and the narrow, nearly horizontal, light, iron coulter, that performs the functions of a mould as well as making a scratchy furrow but a few inches deep. It was drawn by a man at the end of the beam, the ploughman putting his shoulder to the perpendicular bar placed for that purpose, besides guiding the direction of the machine."

At Ning-Hae, the city under the

his friends; but, on the whole, the work is unquestionably one of the very freshest, the most amusing, and the most curious of that Chinese series, which opportunity and enterprise are now so rapidly giving to the

world. The roughly executed map makes the route thoroughly intelligible; and the author has not forgotten to add that most desirable appendage-a carefully-compiled index.

SONGS OF ULSTER, IN MANY MOODS.

Snatches of old sayings that imply
So much more than they express."

No. IV. "LOVE AND MONEY." BY FRANCIS DAVIS.

OH, sitting and sighing the live-long day,

I cannot sing now as I used to do!

What is the reason-can any one say

There's such woe in a world that's so fair to view?

Sing-is it-Jenny, the same as before?

Oh, my poor head aches, and my heart's so sore!

I knew I was poor, and that that was a sin
In the eyes of many who said "No-no!"
But the one sweet voice took my poor heart in,
For to Harry I thought I was all below.
Could I feel I was poor when he called me fair,
As he looked in my eyes and stroked my hair!

Oh, love's like a harp of a thousand strings,
And girls are silly that sit in its way;
For love will talk of a thousand things
That nothing but love could think or say;
And maidens who list what they'd rather believe,
It weren't so easy to undeceive!

That I lay in his light, they had told me long,
For Nelly had riches and beauty, too;

But my heart was weak, and my love was strong,
And I felt it hard to know how to do.
To look in that face, and to bid him "good-bye!"
I knew would be sore, but I said I would try.

How I stood, that eve between eight and nine,
Where the willow bends to the blighted yew,

While wee Flora looked up with the mournful whine,

You'd have thought she knew all that my poor heart knew:
And on Harry I gazed till my eyes grew dim

And he seemed like a mist on the far sky's rim.

I had shaken his hand-I had said "good-bye!"
I had said little more to it, neither had he,
But had looked in my face with a tear in his eye-
Ah, the money alone made him false to me!
Oh! is it a wonder I sing no more-

That my poor head aches-that my heart's so sore?

BELLA DONNA; OR, THE CROSS BEFORE THE NAME.

BOOK THE SECOND-continued.

CHAPTER III.

THE LOVESICK CURATE.