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Rh ground to the foot of a high range to the south. In front of us lay the highest pass on the route, and we halted for the night with the prospect of a climb to 10,000 feet on the morrow. A sharp frost gave a bite to the air as we started, but when the sun broke through the thick white mist which hung over the earth it was pleasant enough.

Both my chair-bearers and the coolies made slow headway up the steep mountain track, and in company with a yamen-runner, who had been sent to escort me by the magistrate at Tung-ch'uan Fu, I was soon far ahead. I had travelled, so far, with little trouble for some hundreds of miles in innermost China, but at length the monotony of my daily and uneventful progress was to be rudely interrupted. I was struggling and panting in the thin dry air, when the yamen-runner, who had dropped behind, came running up gesticulating wildly. Here was a predicament. The man appeared to be rapidly going mad in his wild endeavours to make me understand something—but what? I stood gazing at him in blank astonishment when