Page:Through China with a camera.pdf/352

 within it was divided into two compartments, and in the after one stood a clay cooking galley, around which the boys were stowed. Our crew consisted of a father, Wong-Tsing, and his two sons, Wong-su and Wong-soon. We had to make our way up through the city of Tientsin along a narrow ever-changing channel between thousands of native trading-boats. It was not without a free use of such poles, and the vilest epithets in the language, that we got clear of the floating Babel at last. The left bank, hereabouts, was covered with mounds of salt, piled up beneath the mat sheds which the salt monopolist had erected to protect his precious store.

The river at this point was about 200 yards wide, and Tao pointed out on the right bank the black bare walls of the Sisters ' Chapel that had been burned twelve months before. There, too, we could see the ruins of the hospital where the Sisters of Mercy had consecrated their lives to the ministration of the sick, and to rescuing outcast children ; for which good works they had here been brutally murdered by an ignorant and superstitious mob. There was still a heap of ashes in front of the edifice, and the long breach in its wall through which the murderers dragged their hapless victims to their doom. The breach had indeed been plastered up with mud, a fitting type of the unsatisfactory way in which the Chinese sought to atone for an outrage which was perpetrated almost within sight of the Governor-General's yamen.

From this point, too, we could descry, at the upper end of the reach, the imposing ruins of the Roman Catholic cathedral, the only striking object in the city of Tientsin; and the reflec- tion was forced upon me, from what I know of native super- stition, that that noble pile of buildings, standing as it did so much above what the Chinese themselves hold most sacred in