Intimate China. The Chinese as I have seen them

Chapter I. On The Upper Yan^tse

Boat-travel. — Vegetation. — Trackers. — Terrace of the Sun. — Gold Diamond Mountain.— Meng Liang's Ladder.— Great Szechuan Road. —Steamer Voyage.— Chinese Hades.— Caves 3i

CHAPTER n.

A LAND JOURNEY.

Large Farmsteads.— Wedding Party.— Atoning for an Insult— Rowdy Lichuan.— Old-fashioned Inn.— Dogs Triumphal Progress.— Free Fight.— Wicked Music— Poppy-fields.— Bamboo Stream . . 5^

CHAPTER IIL^

LIFE IN A CHINESE CITY.

Arrangement of a Chinese House.— Crowd in Streets.— My First Walk in Chungking City.— Presents.— Cats, Rats, and Eggs.— Paying a Call.— Ladies Affectionate.— Shocked at European Indecency.— Cost of Freight.— Distance by Post.— Children's Pleasures.— Precautions during Drought.— Guild Gardens.— Pretty Environs.— Opium Flowers, and Smokers.— Babble of Schools.— Chinese Girl-child 74

Contents

CHAPTER IV.

HINDRANCES AND ANNOYANCES.

PAGE

Part II. — The Sights Of Peking

Tibetan Buddhism. — Yellow Temple. — Confucian Temple. — Hall of the Classics. — Disgraceful Behaviour. — Observatory. — Roman Catholic Cathedral. — Street Sights.— British Embassy. — Bribes. — Shams, — Saviour of Society. — Sir Robert Hart 473

CHAPTER L

THE CHINESE EMPEROR'S MAGNIFICENCE.

The Emperor at the Temple of Heaven. — Mongol Princes wTestling. — ^Imperial Porcelain Manufactory. — Imperial Silk Manufactory. — Maids of Honour. — Spring Sacrifices. — Court of Feasting. — Hunting Preserves. — Strikes. — Rowdies. — Young Men to be prayed for . 493

ix

Contents

Chapter II. The Empress, The Emperor, And The Audience

PAGE

A Concubine no Empress. — Sudden Deaths. — Suspicions. — Prince Ch'iin. — Emperor's Education.— His Sadness. — His Features. — Foreign Ministers' Audience. — Another Audience. — Crowding of the Rabble. — Peking's Effect on Foreign Representatives 515

Chapter III. Solidarity, Co-operation, And Imperial Federation

Everybody guaranteed by Somebody Else. — Buying back Office. — Family Responsibilities. — Guilds. — All Employes Partners. — Antiquity of Chinese Reforms. — To each Province so many Posts. — Laotze's Protest against Unnecessary Laws. — Experiment in Socialism. — College of Censors. — Tribunal of History. — Ideal in Theory ............ 532

Chapter IV. Beginnings Of Reform

Reform Club. — Chinese Ladies' Public Dinner. — High School for Girls. — Chinese Lady Doctors insisting on Religious Liberty. — Reformers' Dinner. — The Emperor at the Head of the Reform Party. — Revising Examination Papers. — Unaware of Coming Danger. — Russian Minister's Reported Advice ........ 549

CHAPTER V. THE COUP d'etat

Kang Yii-vvei. — China Mail's Interview. — Beheading of Reformers. — Relatives sentenced to Death. — Kang's Indictment of Empress. — Empress's Reprisals. — Emperor's Attempt at Escape. — Cantonese Gratitude to Great Britain. — List of Emperors Attempted Reforms. — Men now in Power. — Lord Salisbury's Policy in China . . 570

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

Shanghai from the River ... ... ... ... ... ... ... i

Shanghai Creek, with Drawbridge ... ... ... ... ... ... 3

Tea-garden in Shanghai Chinese City ... ... ... ... ... 7

The Bubbling Well 15

Guild Garden at Kiangpei 22

Pavilion in Country Gentleman's Garden ... ... ... ... ... 25

Entrance to Yangtse Gorges 33

White Emperor's Temple, looking down the Gorge of the Fearsome

New and Glorious Rapid ... ... ... ... ... 53

Tree moved 100 Yards by Landslip that formed New Rapid ... ... 54

Iron Cover of Bottomless Well ... ... ... ... ... ... 55

At Fengtu 56

Poppies and Terraced Rice-fields ... ... ... ... 71

Chungking, Commercial Capital of Western China ... ... ... 75

Dinner Party in the Garden of a Member of the Hanlin College, — White

Cloth spread in Compliment to Europeans ... ... ... ... 78

Outside Governor's Residence in Chungking ... ... ... ... 83

Country House near Kiukiang ... ... ... ... ... ... 86

A Chinese Country Club, or Guild Garden ... ... ... ... 94

A Hot Day 95

xi

List of Illustrations

Market Street outside City ...

The Oldest Official in the Province of Szechuan

Giving Evidence in a Court of Justice

Chinese Mode of Salutation ...

Chinese Roman Catholics of Many Generations

Woman's Natural Foot, and another Woman's Feet bound to 6 Inches

Woman's Natural Foot, and another Woman's Feet bound to 4^ Inches

Chinese Roman Catholic Burial-ground

Family of Literati, Leaders in the Anti-footbinding Movement in the

West of China Bridge near Soochow ...

Memorial Arch leading to Confucius' Grave A Country House Party Foot Shuttlecock Wedding Procession ...

New Kvveichovv, built by Order Memorial Arch ...

Shoes to mend ...

Ichang from the City Wall, Hall of Literature, and Pyramid Hill Monastery

The 564 Images of Hangchow

Pavilion of the Moon in Grounds of God of War's Temple Missionary Group at our House-warming ... Soochow, with Mission Church Temple to God of War, Yiinyang Colossal Gilded Buddha Punch and Judy Stone Animals at General's Grave. A Peasant seated on one wi

Straw Hat ...

Entrance to Fairies' Temple, Chungking Play at a Dinner Party in a Guildhall Audience at a Play in a Guildhall

Junk

Captain of Chinese Gunboat ...

Soldier ...

Soldier ...

Gunboat Soldiers ... ... ... ...

Soldiers ...

Temple of God of Literature ...

Map of China, showing Chief Examination Centres

Outside Confucius' Grave

Approach to Confucius' Grave

Fortress of Refuge, Country House, and Memorial Arch ...

Near Ningpo

Salisburia adiantifolia

PAGE

lOI

163 165

175 185

243 246 248

3'9 331

XII

List of Illustrations

Entrance to Monastery

Buddhist Images cut in Cliffs on the River Ya

At Fengtu, Chinese Hades

Begging Priest, once a General

Jack (Long-haired Shantung Terrier)

Sacred Tiger

Great Precipice of Mount Omi

Priest and Pilgrims on Edge of Omi Precipice

Cloud Effects on Mount Omi

Guard-house near the Arsenal

Roof and Roof-end at Chungking

Bridge at Hangchovv ...

Bridge and Causeway on West Lake

Sacred Sai King Mountain ...

Brick-tea Carriers on the Great Brick-tea Road

Caravanserai at Tachienlu

In a Chungking Guild-house ...

Packing Tea

Chinese Hydraulic Apparatus

Peking Pug (Short-haired)

Peking Lion-dog (Long-haired)

On a Mountain Road ...

A Wheelbarrow Stand

Interior of Governor's Official Residence at Hangchovv

Farmer and Water Buffaloes ...

Paper-burning Temples

Approach to Ming Emperors' Tombs, Peking

Tomb over Banjin Lama's Clothes, built after Tibetan Model of Marble. Bell-like Cupola and Upper Ornaments of Gold. Inscriptions Devanagari Character, Sanscrit, and Chinese ...

Lotus Pond and Dagoba in Emperor's Garden

Mountain Village, with Sham Beacon Fires to Left, Foochow Sedan-chair in Front

Shan Ch'ing, Prince Ch'iin, and Li Hung-chang

Late Viceroy Tso Tsung-tang

Emperor Kwang-shii, 1875

Prince Kung

The Great W^all

Incense-burner ...

Country House in Yangtse Gorges ...

Kiangsi Guild-house in Chungking

Downward-bound Cargo-boat

Bridge at Soochovv

Mr. King, Manager of the Chinese Telegraph Company and Founder of High Schools for Girls

459 466 468

477 483

489 495 505 516

523 528

537 540

List of Illustrations ^

Wen Ting-shih, the Reformer, Late Tutor to the Ladies of the Imperial

Houseliold Head Eunuch of the Empress-Dowager Kiaochou, seized by Germany Britisli and Chinese Flags, June 15th, 1898: Tow:

Distance ...

Ferry at Ichang Approach to Ming Emperor's Tomb, Nanking n of VVei-hai-wei in

563 574. 583

597 605

XIV

DRY STATEMENTS.

(TO BE CARRIED WITH THE READER, IF POSSIBLE.)

The Chinese Empire is rather larger than Europe.

Being on the eastern side of a great continent, it has the same extremes of climate as are to be found in the United States.

Fruits, flowers, and crops vary in Hke manner.

Peking is on about the same parallel as Madrid, Chungking as Cairo, Shanghai as Madeira,

The population of China is over ... ... ... 385 millions.

That of the British Isles in 1891 not quite ... ... 38 „

One alone of China's eighteen provinces, Kiangsu, has over 39I

The Russian nation, already extending over one-sixth of the globe, while China only extends over a little more than one-twelfth, musters little over 129 millions, and thus has about one-third of the Chinese population, with about twice its territory to stretch itself in.

There is no Poor Law in China. There are no Sundays.

It is considered very unwomanly not to wear trousers, and very indelicate for a man not to have skirts to his coat ; consequently our European dress is reckoned by Chinese as indecorous.

Chinese begin dinner with dessert or Russian sakouska, and finish with hot soup instead of hot coffee.

Their cooks are second only to the French ; their serving-men surpass the Germans.

Chinese love children ; are ready to work day and night for their masters ; and if occasion demand, to be beaten in their place, or even, if needs be, to die for them.

In fine, although in all details unlike ourselves, a great race, with some magnificent qualities.

7, Park Pl.^ce, St. James's, S.W.

SHANGHAI FROM THE RIVER.

PRELUDE.

FIJ^ST IMPRESSIONS.

Arriving in Shanghai. — My First Tea-season. — Inside a Chinese City. — Shanghai Gardens. — In the Romantic East at last !

I. Arriving in Shanghai.

IT was in the merry month of May, 1887, that I first landed in China ; but fi-om the first there was nothing merry about China. It felt bitterly cold, after passing, through the tropics ; and in Shanghai one shivered in a warm wrap, as the wind blew direct from the North Pole straight at one's chest, till one day it suddenly turned quite hot, and all clothes felt too heavy. Every one almost knows what Shanghai is like. It has been admirably described over and over again, with its rows of fine European houses fronting the river, the beautiful pubHc gardens and well-trodden grass-plats interposed between the two ; with its electric lights and its carriages, and great European stores, at which you can buy everything you could possibly want only a very little dearer than in London. There used to be nothing romantic or Eastern about it. Now, darkened by the smoke of over thirty factories, it is flooded by an ever-increasing Chinese population, who jostle with Europeans in the thoroughfare, till it seems as if the struggle between the two races would be settled in the streets of Shanghai, and the European get driven to the wall. For the Chinaman always goes a steady pace, and in his many garments, one upon the top of the other, presents a solid, impenetrable front to the hurrying European ; whilst the wheelbarrows on which his womankind are conveyed rush in and out amongst the carriages, colliding here and there with a cooliedrawn ricksha, and always threatening the toes of the foot-passenger. Too often there are no foot-pavements, and the whole motley crowd at its very varying paces is forced on to the muddy street. Ever and anon even now a closed sedan-chair, with some wealthy Chinaman from the adjacent Chinese city, threads its way in and out among the vehicles, noiseless and stealthy, a reminder of China's past glories. There are also now wholly Chinese streets in the foreign settlement, where all the shop-fronts are gorgeous with gilding and fine decorative Chinese characters, where all the shops have signs which hang j^erpendicularly across the street-way, instead of horizontal!)' over

-^ Sights of Shanghai

the shop-front as with us, and where Chinese shopkeepers sit inside, bare to the waist, in summer presenting a most unpleasing picture of too much flesh, and in winter masses of fur and satin.

Shanghai has got a capital racecourse, and theatre, and cricket-ground — grounds for every kind ot sport, indeed. It has a firstrate club, and an ill-kept museum.

SHANGHAI CREEK, WITH DRAWBRIDGE. '

Its sights are the bubbling well and the tea-garden in the China town, believed by globe-trotters, but erroneously, to be the original of the willow-pattern plate. Beside this, there is what is called the Stone Garden, full of picturesque bits. A great deal that is interesting is to be seen in the China town by those who can detach their minds from the dirt ; in one part all the houses have drawbridges leading to them. But even the Soochow Road in the foreign settlement has never yet been treated pictorially as it deserves. It is the Palais Royal of Chinese Shanghai. At the hour when carriage traffic may only pass one way because of the crowd, it would reward an Alma-Tadema to depict the Chinese dandies filling all its many balconies, pale and silken clad, craning their necks to see, and by the haughtiness of their gaze recalling the decadent Romans of the last days of the empire. Their silken garments, their arched mouths, the coldness of their icy stare, has not yet been duly depicted. Chun Ti Kinig, by the late Mr. Claude Rees, is so far the only attempt to describe their life. Yet they, too, have souls possibly worth the awakening. With their long nails, their musk-scented garments, their ivory opium-pipes, and delicate arrangements of colours, they cannot be without sensibilities. Do they feel that the Gaul is at the gates, and that the China of their childhood is passing away ?

It is this China of their childhood, with here an anecdote and there a descriptive touch, which I hope to make the English reader see dimly as in a glass in the following pages, which are not stored with facts and columns of statistics. People who want more detailed information about China, I would refer to Sir John Davis's always pleasant pages ; or to my husband's Througk the Yangtse Gorges, containing the result of years of observation ; or to dear old Marco Polo's account of his travels in the thirteenth century, revivified by the painstaking labours of Colonel Yule, and thereby

-^ Brown and Muddy

made into one of the best books on China extant. For my part, I shall endeavour to make the reader see China and the Chinese as I have seen them in their homes and at their dinner parties, and living long, oh ! such long summer days among them, and yet wearier dark days of winter. And to make the reader the more feel himself amongst the scenes and sights I describe, I mean to adopt various styles, sometimes giving him the very words in which I at the time dashed off my impressions, all palpitating with the strangeness and incongruity of Chinese life, at others giving him the result of subsequent serious reflections.

But here let me record my first great disappointment, because it may be that of many another. Brown mud is the first thing one sees of China. Brown mud accompanies the traveller for miles along the Yangtse River, all along the Peiho, up to brown and muddy Tientsin, and on up to Peking itself. China generally is not at all like the willow-pattern plate. I do not know if I really had expected it to be blue and white ; but it was a disappointment to find it so very brown and muddy.

II. My First Tea-season.

It was dull and leaden all the six hundred miles up the great river Yangtse ; and at first it poured nearly all day and every day at Hankow, and we shivered over fires. Nevertheless, in spite of absolutely leaden skies and never a glimpse of sunshine, the coolies and the twenty-years-in-China-and-don't-speak-a-word-ofthe-language men wore sun-hats, and pretended to get ill from the glare, when any one fresh from England would certainly say it was the damp. The floods were all the while advancing on what looked like a beleaguered city, when we went out on the plain outside, and gazed back at the city wall, with its dark water-line clearly marked all round close to the top.

The country round certainly did not tempt one to go out very often on to che rotten flag-stoned way by which one walked three or four miles in order to reach a one-mile distance as the crow flies, feeble-looking corn and marsh at either side, with an occasional tandem of buffaloes groaning not in unison with the discordant creaking of the cart they drew. Yet we plodded past the little homesteads, each planted on its own artificial hill, faced with stones on the side the floods come from. The very friendly people all used to come out of their cottages, and call out, " Do rest with us awhile," " Come in, do, and have some tea " ; but till I spoke a little more Chinese, I did not care to repeat this often : though I rather enjoyed the first time going in and having tea, delicious tea, brought us at once — next a pipe, and then a bowl of water. Nothing could be friendlier than the people ; and somehow or other I used to fancy from the first I held quite conversations with them. But what we either of us said to each other in words it is impossible to tell ; there is so much one understands without knowing the words. So on and on we used to plod, resisting all kindly pressure to turn in, till gradually the reflection of the setting sun gave a red glow to the water in the ruts,

-^ Hankow City

and frogs hopped in numbers across the path, and bats whirled after mosquitoes. Then at last by an effort we summoned up will enough to turn, and plod just exactly the same way over the selfsame stones back to Hankow, the beleaguered city, with its avenues of over-arching willows, and beautiful Bund half a mile long — a mile walk up and down, therefore, as every one takes care to tell you the first day you arrive, as if afraid lest, stricken by a sort of midsummer madness, you should actually leave the English settlement, with its willows and its villas, and attempt to penetrate into the Chinese town.

The stories I heard about the Chinese town gave me quite a feeling of excitement the first time I went into it. People threatened me with horrible sights, and still more horrible smells. But I fancy those, who talk in this way, can know very little of the East End of London, and nothing of the South of France or Italian towns. Hankow certainly struck me as very fairly clean, considering how crowded its streets are, and the people at that time for the most part as wonderfully civil. I should not care to hear the shower of abuse, that would greet a foreigner in one of our English towns, who turned over and examined all the articles on a stall, then went away without buying anything, as English people do not hesitate to do there. The Kiangsi and Hunan Guild-houses are both well worth a visit, although the former has been In large measure burnt down, and thus stripped of those wonderful coloured tiles about which the few, who have seen them, are still enthusiastic. Most people have never seen them at all. As it is now, the temple to the god of literature at Hanyang has more charms for me, with its many curved roofs making such an harmonious, rich, dark medley. However, of course in Hankow no one in the month of May is thinking about architecture. " Thou art not science, but thou tea-chest art " is the riddle they were all engaged with, and they were very sad over it. For the tea was bad ; and thouoh the Chinamen had bound themselves under awful penalties to have no second crop, yet of course the second crop would be there soon. I looked sadly at the men from Hunan, sitting so truculently in their boats, with their pigtails twice coiled round their heads, counting over beforehand the gains they meant to take back home ; for probably there would be none. We talked tea at breakfast and tiffin and dinner, and we took it at five and considered its quality. But that would not make the people at home give up Indian tea, with all its tannin and nerve-poisoning qualities. So in between-whiles we counted up how many suicides there were last tea-season. F'or Chinese have a fine sense of honesty, if not of honour ; and merchants are apt to kill themselves, if they cannot meet their obligations. "There will be more suicides this year," said first one, then another.

Meanwhile, the pretty painted boxes streamed past the house at the rate of eighty a minute sometimes — always noiselessly carried by coolies in huge sun-hats, and too often through the dripping rain. And the

^ Tea-steamers rORTERS WAITING FOR WORK.

great gamble went on, and the men who dropped in to call looked wearier and wearier. But that was all In 1887, which might almost be called the last year of the great China tea trade of which Hankow had since 1 86 1 been the centre. There was quite a fleet of ocean steamers there even that year to take the tea away; In 1898, barely one for London. English people will not drink China tea. It Is so delicate that, though in Itself Inexpensive, It comes dear from more leaf having to be used to produce the same strength of liquor. But it is soothing, whilst Indian tea puts a fresh strain upon our already overtaxed digestions.

In old days the Hankow tea trade was a great business. Tea-tasters came out from England in

II crowds, arriving in May and going away in July. They would taste two hundred different teas, not swallowing the tea, but just savouring its flavour, and smelling it, and handling the leaf. Then the man who could not tell the same tea again when he went over the two hundred the second time was no tea-taster. They were pale men for the most part, of rather finely strung susceptibilities, or their palates would not have been so critical. And they did not care much for games of chance, they gambled so high in tea, a fortnight's business easily leading a man to win or lose ^20,000.

Ah ! the good old days of China tea and silk are gone. Are there better days yet to come in the new China that is to take the place of old China, which is passing away even as we talk about it ?

III. Inside a Chinese City.

One of the most exciting moments of all my life in China was when I first found myself shut up within the walls and barred gates of Wuchang, the provincial capital of Hupeh, one of the rowdiest provinces of China. And of the three cities that meet together and almost join — Hankow and W^uchang being separated by the there three-quarter-mile wide Yangtse, and Hankow and Hanyang separated by the boat-covered Han — Wuchang has the reputation- of being the most rowdy. It is there, of course, the Provincial Examinations arc held ; and when men assemble in their thousands away from their families and friends, they are in all countries apt to be unruly.

■^ Inside the Gates

Probably, of all the hundreds of foreign tea-men who visited Hankow, barely one or two had been across the river to Wuchang. But a missionary, who was living alone there, and seemed to feel his loneliness, asked us to go over and spend the night with him ; and wnth many doubts as to what kind of accommodation he could give us, and whether we should be inconveniencing him, we accepted. I have often been to Wuchang since then. But I remember still the thrill with which, when I went to bed that night, I stood at the window and listened to the strange, unfamiliar sounds from the street beyond the compound, or garden. There was the night-watchman crying the hours, and clacking his pieces of bamboo together to warn evil-doers to keep off But he did it in a way I had not yet heard. Then there were such curious long drawn-out street cries, all unknown, and sounds of people calling to one another, and the buzz of a great city. And I suddenly realised, with a choking sense of emotion, that the gates were shut, and I was within there with a whole cityful of Chinese so hostile to foreigners, and especially to foreign women, that it had not been thought safe to let me walk through them to the missionary's house. Even the curtain of my sedan-chair had been drawn down, so that I might not be seen by any one.

Wuchang has always been specially Interesting to me, because it was my first Chinese city. And it is so characteristic a one. Every Chinese city is supposed to be placed on hills representing a serpent and a tortoise, although the likeness has often to be helped out by a temple on the tortoise's head, or a pagoda to connect the serpent's coils. But at Wuchang the serpent and tortoise are very plainly visible. Then all Chinese cities are apt to be rude. But the people at Wuchang are so particularly rude. How often have not the gentlemen accompanying me, when in subsequent years I have dared to walk through its streets, had to separate themselves from me, and to walk backwards, exhorting the oncoming crowd of roughs to propriety of behaviour ! Curiously enough, the roughest of Chinese roughs get red and uncomfortable, when you tell them you fear they have never learnt politeness, do not observe the rules of decorum, etc., etc. I learnt it as a patter simply from hearing it said in my own defence, and have often raised a blush since then by saying it myself. I doubt if the same results would be obtained by ever so eloquent a paraphrase of the fourth commandment down Whitechapel way. But Chinese, whether they follow them or not, seem all to have been taught to hold in respect the dicta of the ancients. To this day a quotation from Confucius will often settle a moot point in weighty affairs of State. Would that it were so among ourselves with a Christian text !

IV. SnANonAi Public Gardens.

To those who have just arrived off a long sea voyage, as U) those who from time to time come down from some roadless, gasless, shopless, but smell-ful m thp: bubbling well.

-^ Shanghai Gardens

up-country sojourn, there is one bit of Shanghai that is exceptionally refreshing and delightsome ; and that is the garden by the river. At night, when the lamps are lit and mirrored in the water in rows and garlands of light, when the sea-breeze blows in freshly, and friends gather in the gardens, I have even heard it asserted by its greatest detractors, '' Shanghai is as good as any other place by night."

But it is in the mornings in winter, or in the beforedinner hours in summer, when the band plays, that you must go there, properly to know what the Shanghai Gardens are like. First and foremost, they are full of flowers — flowers with colours and scents. I do not know how many other people may be thus constituted, but there are occasions when I would as soon meet Keats' ''Belle Dame Sans Merci " ''alone and palely loitering " as wander through such unmitigated greenery as the Botanic Gardens at Singapore offer to the passing traveller, at least in the month of April. Kew Gardens are all too often depressing after the same fashion ; though there one can always fall back upon the greenhouses to see

" How great Nature truly joys in red and green, What sweet thoughts she thinks In violets and pinks And a thousand blushing hues made solely to be seen."

Hongkong Gardens are very fair to see, resembling those of Babylon in being hanging gardens, gardens of terraces. But the way in which the Shanghai Gardens are fitted in between the Bund and the

Soochow Creek, with the much-traversed Garden Bridge giving something definite to look at, and the river girdling it all — the river with its ever-moving panorama of swift ocean steamers and perky little

SOOCHOW CREEK, SHANGHAI.

Steam-launches, and yachts and junks of deeply dyed sails, and brilliant coloured sanpans, all within a stone'sthrow, — this situation makes the Shanghai Gardens a place not easily to be matched for passing away ^the after-sunshine hours. But flowers are the Shanghai Gardens' forte. They should be seen when they are idl abloom with roses ; or when lordly tulips dazzle the eye witli their scarlet and gold, till it is fain to seek relief among those blue and white fairies dancing in

iS

^ Lilium auratum

the sunshine — sweet-scented hyacinths ; or when the chrysanthemums are in season. All these flowers are seen against a background of glossy-leaved magnolias, with their pale sweet-scented blossoms, and oleandertrees, and pomegranates and acacias, all in their different seasons glorious with rose and scarlet or feathery pink and white blossoms.

At one season there is a borderful, but full to overflowing, as those borders almost always are, of the Japanese Lilium auratum, a large, almost arrogant, white lily, with a broad band of gold down each petal. A little while before, people went to the far garden across the road to see the fly-devouring flower, and inhale its fetid breath as of dead men's — not bones, certainly — and all uncleanness. Next the water-lilies claimed their attention, and the poetic rosy lotus flowers, one of which grew so fast, and with such precision of rectitude, that its bud forced its way right through the overshadowing fleshy leaf, and there expanded into a beautiful blossom at its leisure.

The rarely visited fernery at the end of this garden well deserves more frequent visits. There you will find that quaint Asplenium bulbifertcm, that drops ofl~ little plants, that happen to be growing about its leaves like little accidents, and eventually develop into big plants, that again do likewise. There are also fine specimens of the Australian Platyceriimi, which you do not wonder to find called grande, so solid and woollyfeeling are its great lumps of leaf That brown irregular mark underneath one of the abruptly broken-off leaves is not decay, but spores of seed. This, with the name of Alicorne, something like an inverted porcupine, reaching out all round hands, some with three fingers, some with six, sometimes with the fingers tipped underneath with seed, sometimes not, is said to have arrived looking for all the world like a withered cabbage. Then it sprouted and burgeoned ; and now it is a thing of joy for ever, not to be in the least dwarfed or put into the shade by Australian tree-ferns of really treelike proportions growing close alongside.