Page:Through China with a camera.pdf/438

 vain were all these toilsome precautions! The danger that was threatening them within the country they all the while failed to guard against, and from this very cause at last the native dynasty had to succumb before an alien race. To understand this we must remember that a rebel wrested the throne from the last Chinese Emperor, and that, when this usurper had been in turn dethron- ed, the Manchus, taking advantage of ^the existing disorder, came in and conquered China.

On my return journey I fell in with a gang of convicts, heavily chained and sent adrift to seek a precarious living in the pass. There they spent existence, shut out from the villages and shunned by all. One who had charge of the rest, rode an ass. Half the hair had been rubbed off this poor brute's back by the irons of its rider, and even respectable donkeys as they passed trains, would hold no intercourse with it. Many of the traders we met were fine-looking men, and few went by us without bestowing a kindly salutation.

At Nankow I put up again at the inn, and there found a native merchant in possession of the best room. He politely offered to vacate it in my favour, but this I, of course, refused to allow, contenting myself with an apartment where Ahong, having first obtained the unwilling consent of the landlord, set to with a half-naked slave to reduce the table and chair until they disclosed the wood of which they were made. There were also many spider-webs, but we left these undisturbed, for their bloated occupants were feasting on the flies with which the room was infested. The merchant had a train of fourteen mules, an elegant sedan, and a troop of muleteers, who were carousing in the next apartment. A merry time they had of it! One of them was still gesticulating like a Chinese stage- warrior as I dropped off to sleep.