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 posed to possess, its ground as originally allotted to it within the Imperial city; and before the cottage doorways one may still see square paper lamps, whose colours denote the banners to which their proprietors respectively belong. But time has changed the stern rules under which the Chinese were confined to their own quarter. Their superior industry and their slowly but surely accumulating wealth have gradually made them masters of the Tartar warriors, and of their allotments within the sacred city. In fact, Chinese thrift and commercial energy have conquered the descendants of the doughty Manchus who drove the Mings from the throne.

It can hardly be credited by the stranger who visits this Chinese centre of the universe, that the miserable beings whom he sees clad in sheep-skins out of the Imperial bounty, and acting as watchmen to the prosperous Chinese, are in reality the remnants of those noble nomads who were at one time a terror to Western Europe, and at a later date the conquerors of the "Central Flowery Land."

The old walls of the great city are truly wonderful monuments of human industry. Their base is sixty feet wide, their breadth at the top about forty feet, and their height also averages forty feet. But, alas ! time and the modern arts of warfare have rendered them practically nothing more than interesting relics of a bygone age. A wooden stockade would now-a-days be about as effective a protection to the Imperial throne within. They seem to be well defended, however. Casting our eyes up to the great tower above the gateway, we can see that it bristles with guns; yet the little field-glass of modern science reveals to us after all only a mock artillery, painted muzzles on painted boards, threatening sham terrors through the countless embrasures. A few rusty, dismantled cannon lie here and there beneath the