It startled a number of white cranes, shrouded in the sombre foliage which overhung the dank and dismal moat, and who seemed to regard with amazement the advent of two living creatures into the city of the dead. The gate was opened and a plank put down by a thing as near a skeleton as I should think could be found to perform such necessary and useful labour. I have no experience of living skeletons in England. I have heard of persons said to be "only a bag of bones;" but in China any one desirous of studying anatomy might do so with great facility, especially upon the habitual opium-smokers. Our Coolies declined to enter the gate, so we stepped across the plank alone, and entered the city of death. The skeleton guardian vanished as soon as he had performed his office, and we walked in. borne on the shoulders of two or four Coolies who trip away with their burden at a sort of trot. It was a bright, beautiful morning, the weather being just sufficiently cool to be enjoyable. As I have remarked, there are no roads around Canton, and no need for any, as there are neither carriages nor horses. Thus the pathway is only made wide enough for one foot-passenger. Chinese always walk like Red Indians in single file. Sometimes this track is a mere ridge between two paddi fields lying under water, sometimes skirting the side of the hill, or on the border of one of the innumerable streams of water which intersect Canton like a tangle of silver braid; but every scrap of land is cultivated to its utmost capacity. It is laid out principally in kitchen-gardens, well kept, neat, and flourishing. It has often been a subject of speculation to me, when leaving Lon- It presented at first sight the appeardon by the Clapham Junction, who could ance of any other Chinese city, with the possibly eat all the cabbages which I exception of the dead silence, dearth of saw growing. I believe there are more movement, and a sort of atmosphere cabbages consumed in Canton than in which felt vapid and stagnant. There London; for although the population is were the same narrow streets paved with probably about the same, I do not sup- the cobble-stones, the same quaint little pose that every one in London habitually square houses with the elaborate screen and inevitably eats cabbage, whereas in in the doorway instead of a door, the Canton I believe it is the rule without ex- little latticed venetian window-frames ception; but even the cabbages are in whence the Chinese woman satisfies her direct opposition to ours, they grow long curiosity as to what is going on in the instead of round. It was quite a refresh-outer world. But here no eyes peeped ing sight, all these flourishing gardens, through, no figures glided in and out with the patient, industrious labourers from behind the screen, no pattering feet weeding and watering the latter in the of bearer Coolies smoothed the cobblemost primitive fashion. The waterman stones, no cry of vendor of fruit and fish carried two buckets slung on a pole broke the dull monotony. The streets across his shoulders with wickerwork intersected each other and ran in crooked tops, and by jerking himself first on one zigzags, as most Chinese streets do. foot, and then on the other, he contrived Here and there were patches of garden to slop out the water pretty equally on ground planted with cadaverous sapless either side as he walked along. Strings flowers, looking as though they had been of Coolies, all with poles across their struck with paralysis. A few dwarfed shoulders, were carrying baskets laden shrubs stood languidly up, seeming as with green ginger, cabbages, onions, and though they could not put forth more turnips, which persistently grow long in- than one leaf in a century. There was stead of round, spinage, and a great variety no hum of insects or flies, not even the of herbs and vegetables unknown in this ubiquitous mosquito. Not so much as a country. They all moved respectfully rat ran across the silent streets, which into the ditch to allow us to pass, with a we traversed for some time, experiencing polite salutation or the pleasant wish that with terrible acuteness the irksome jar of our grandmothers might live forever. our own footfall. My companion sugTraversing this smiling pasture for some gested that we should enter one of the miles, we came in sight of a fortified houses, we therefore stepped behind the walled city with a moat around, over screen and found ourselves in an ordinary which was a drawbridge. The yell by Chinese parlour or receiving room, furwhich our Coolies announced our arrival nished with the usual black ebony chairs and desire to have the bridge lowered and teapoys, with the quaint gaudy picand gate opened, sounded weird and hol- tures lacking perspective, which one low, and the echo from within sepulchral.' might fancy are hung in sheer perversity perpendicularly instead of horizontally, in the name of the crown pendente lite. commencing at the ceiling and extending After wasting in prison for a year or so to the floor in a narrow strip, the figures the prisoner would be adjudged to lose appearing on various stages as upon a half his property. He would probably ladder. At one end of the room was the resist, for a Chinese hates to have his altar, which adorns the principal apart- money taken from him above all things. ment of every Chinese house, sustaining You may beat him, starve him, punish some ferocious-looking joss, which repre-him in any way, but if you stop his wages sents either saint or demigod. On either he goes into despair and howls to make side were brass urns containing smoul-himself heard a mile off. Thus, refusing dering incense, and in the front cups of to pay, the unfortunate moneyed man is tea and samshoo. I do not know if the sent back to prison, and ere long is tea was hot. I did not taste it, for if it is found guilty enough to merit death; his ill to step in dead men's shoes, it must property forfeited to the Imperial debe worse to drink dead men's tea! In scendant of the Sun, first, however, passthe centre of the room was a bulky arti-ing through the sticky fingers of the cle which looked like an ottoman or mandarin. The one who lay stretched divan covered with a quilted silk counter-before us under the crimson and gold pane or mastoyd, such as is used on Chi- mastoyd was said to have been quite an nese beds, and it might have passed for adept in this nefarious system of plunone of those most uncomfortable arti-dering his victims by compassing their cles of furniture. But it was hollow, death-literally "bleeding them." Who and within it lay the inhabitant of the knows but perhaps we have got this paindwelling, sleeping his last long sleep; ful expression from the Chinese? never more to rise; never more to sip I was informed that he had immense his tea or samshoo, though it waited wealth with him in his coffin, and was there prepared for him; never to sit adorned with all his jewels and costly on his ebony chairs; never to light mandarin dress. The coffin or state-bed any more joss-stick to his ancestors, but on which he lay had cost one thousand have them lit for him by his posterity. pounds. The outer one was of ebony, There were other chambers in the house beautifully inlaid with gold, silver, ivory, similarly furnished, except that the mas- and mother-of-pearl. The inner one was toyd was thrown back, and displayed an of the famous ironwood, from Borneo or empty coffin, which lay ready lined with Burmah, considered more invulnerable sandal-wood, its owner not being yet than metal, as it neither rusts nor decays, dead. The verandah was furnished with and defies the white ant. Within that the usual green porcelain seats and vases there was a sandal-wood shell lined with in which seemed to stagnate the blood- velvet, the body being highly spiced to less flowers. We stole softly out into preserve it. The furniture of the house the street, chilled, and painfully yet not might well exceed a thousand pounds. mournfully impressed. We went into the The altar-cloth and hangings were of rich next door; that house was " To Let Un- embroidered silk with a profusion of gold furnished." A third was rich in gilding fringe, and the lattice filigree which the and vermilion, and mirrors reflected and Chinese are so fond of introducing everyglittered through the rooms. The ebony where, was gilt and vermilion. The floor and ivory furniture was most beautifully was inlaid marble. Such was the gorcarved. The tea and samshoo cup were geous house the Mandarin Shang Yung of exquisite egg-shell china; objets de had raised for himself on the bones of vertu lay about on the altar emblazoned his victims to live in when he was dead, with real jewels. The bed was covered if I may be excused the bull. There is a with a magnificent crimson velvet quilt, richly embroidered in gold and seed pearls, with a deep bullion fringe worth its weight in gold. Under the quilt lay a high mandarin, who had amassed an enormous fortune by the very simple process of chopping off the heads of all such as he discovered to be possessed of money. His method was simplicity in itself. He would first seek a small quarrel, cast the owner of the wealth into prison, take possession of the property 66 very common reflection made in England as regards misers amassing wealth. 'Ah, well, he cannot take it with him." Not so in China, for he does take it with him, at least part of the way, and is more particular about his entourage when dead than when living; whether they have some notion of remunerating old Charon to supply a better craft, or to bribe the officials of purgatory; for the Chinese believe fully in that expiatory region, and, no doubt, shrewdly guess that the author The death city near Canton was said to contain several thousand inhabitants. The houses were rented by the year or month. There were some very old inhabitants, judging from the dilapidated appearance of the furniture and drapery. In one house there was a large family, one coffin in each room, and the father and mother in the grand chamber. ities there might be susceptible to filthy lucre, as they have found them to be in China Proper. Also, according to the thrifty view they take of most things, they might consider that it was safer to buy themselves out of purgatory than to leave the money with priests or relatives for that purpose, as some Christians have thought meet to do. For instance, Ferdinand and Isabella, having, it might be assumed, a deep-rooted conviction of their own wickedness, left a large fortune to endow a chapel, where mass was to be said every day à perpétuité for the ben-dering about in this oddly dreary place, fit of their souls in purgatory. But the Chinese are curiously prosaic and matter-of-fact in all their dealings, and in none more so than their arrangements as to their future state. Recurring to the death city, my readers must not suppose that it was a large cemetery like that of New Orleans, built above ground, where the dead are placed in monuments erected for the purpose, and for the reason that the Mississippi is constantly overflowing and would wash any underground grave away. This cemetery also presents a curious ensemble of miniature villas and tiny churches, for many families have mass said in their mausoleums once a year upon All Souls' festival, the corpses ranged around on shelves forming the congregation. Some of the monuments are several storeys high; all detached, with beautiful gardens around them. This is really a cemetery, a graveyard above ground; whereas the Chinese death city is nothing of the kind. The dead are not interred, and never intended to be. They are merely lodgers pro tem., in a sort of luxurious morgue, until their own final resting-place shall have been decided upon by the professional diviner, or that it shall be convenient to move them to their own homes and ancestral funeral pyres. The grand Chinese idea is that the whole family should be gathered together in death for generations and generations; and they carry it out practically further than any other people. Though, strange to say, the Americans - the newest nation have actually adopted this oldworld idea, and though of course they have no remote ancestors to lie beside, yet they object to be buried in the place where they die. Being a strangely gregarious people when alive, they seem even indisposed to rest when dead, and the travelling about of corpses is a unique feature in the manners and customs of the United States. They were all waiting to go to Pekin, their native city, waiting until the then head of the family, holding a government appointment, should be recalled. Wan which was neither mirth nor woe, the painful stillness and the heavy atmosphere being the only elements which inspired awe, my nerves, nevertheless, received a sudden shock, when, just as I was examining the decorations of an apparently new visitor, speaking in whispers and raising the mastoyd, a shrill shriek made me start, drop the mastoyd, and clutch my companion by the arm, and for a minute I could scarcely control my fright. He laughed, for it was only the crowing of a cock; but I declare St. Peter was never more startled. Thus, when the nerves, like an instrument, are tuned to a certain pitch, a sudden contrast creates a jar and breaks the string. I had become so in unison with silence that even a rooster had the power to terrify me. But this was a proof that the corpse was a fresh one, as the white cock, without a coloured feather, which accompanies the coffin is usually left there when the body merely goes into lodgings. If really interred, I believe he is killed and eaten. In another portion of the city we saw several of them, though I think they were past crowing. Some of the interior walls of the houses were decorated with portraits supposed to represent the defunct; on the toilet tables were the brass basins used for ablutions; and in one, where there was a portrait of a lady, who must have been a Chinese beauty, there was a large pot of red paint and another of white, which the Chinese use unsparingly; by the side of that lay her jade comb, and silver pins, and the gum which is used to stiffen the hair. Something in this amalgamation of life in death recalled to me a similar day spent in the dead cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii, where the ladies' toilet stood just as she had left it centuries ago; the bread seemed still baking in the ovens; and although the bolies had been removed as soon as found to the museum, yet the evidence of their presence seemed so fresh that might have left but yesterday. they | Limbo for centuries to recover this essential part of a man. Thus these poor We quitted the city, nothing loth. We rebels, having revolted against the suseemed to breathe more freely when fairly preme head and regal descendant of the outside the pent air of the death city. The Sun, were to be punished for time and skeleton was hovering about the entrance eternity; for there can be no resurrecgate, with a view to coppers, for if he tion of the body without its head. Dicould not eat he certainly required to rectly the executioner had severed it smoke opium, which was in truth the se- from the body, the latter was thrust into cret of his extreme leanness; and surely a wooden box, slung over the Coolies' he might be excused if, whilst his living shoulders, and carried to this field, a real bones were doomed to remain in this Haceldama, the blood dripping the whole dreary sepulchre, he should endeavour way, marking the path to the field of to transport his spirit into blissful dream- | blood. It may be fairly inferred that a land by means of the opium pipe. Again shell coffin was intended for each victim, we startled the lonely heron steadfastly but the cupidity of the mandarin who regarding the dark green moat, no doubt had charge to furnish them made one in solemn contemplation of some knotty problem of heròn life. We backed ourselves between the poles into our boxes, like horses into the shafts of a cart, were hoisted on to the shoulders of our Coolies, and departed. box serve for a hundred or two victims, until the wood became spongy with gore. Moreover, the Coolies who were charged to bury them, following the example of their superiors, instead of going to the trouble of digging graves, tossed the mutilated bodies on to the bare earth like so much offal, and ran off for another load. In spite of the vultures and birds of prey which came in flocks for twenty miles round Canton, and hovered like a dark cloud over the bloody graves of the rebels, the putrefaction soon produced a pestilence in the city itself, though several miles distant. The fearful carnage continued for weeks and the headsman's sword laboured from dawn until sunset. The prisoners were generally in a semi We did not return the same way we had come, through the flower-beds and gardens, but, making a detour, we resolved to take all the horrors on the same day and visit the grave-ground of the rebels. This is a piece of dreary waste land, without boundary or any sign which the imagination could dwell upon to suggest the land of horror which it really is. For the very earth has been saturated with human gore, the very soil is composed of human flesh, and the rucks and heaps that look so arid and un-state of syncope. Having been taken as sightly are mounds of human bones. It was here that the bleeding bodies of the rebels, butchered upon the execution ground before alluded to, were carried to be buried. Finally, the ground became so full that there was no earth left to cover them; yet they were still cast down in heaps for the vultures to serve as undertakers to, at least as regarded the flesh. Rebellion being the greatest crime a Chinese can commit, it is punnished in the severest manner, not only in this world, as they think, but in the next, by not allowing him a proper burial. Cutting off the head on earth is a trivial mishap in comparison with depriving him of it in purgatory. In a representation of that mythical Botany Bay, I observed a number of headless figures. They had been decapitated, and a boundless gulf placed between their capital and their trunk. They had been waiting in rebels, whether guilty or no, they were driven like cattle to the shambles. And here again the covetousness of the mandarins in charge would consider that, as they had to die when their turn came, it was useless to provide them with food, and he might as well put the money in his pocket. One hundred thousand are said to have manured that horrible piece of ground, so dry and arid, and for months and months it was impossible for the living to pass that way. And yet, in spite of this atrocious punishment, the Chinese are the most turbulent nation under the sun, at home or abroad; they plot to overthrow the ruling power; their secret societies are universal; and every few years they must have an outbreak. We returned home sad and weary with this long day, spent under the shadow of death on the dark side of humanity. From The Cornhill Magazine. CHAPTER XI. (CONTINUED.) THE bustle of dinner was all over and the house still again in the dreary afternoon quiet, when Agatha, once more, with many precautions, stole into the room. "Are you awake?" she said; "I hope your head is better. Mr. Incledon is in the drawing-room, and mamma says, please, if you are better will you go down, for she is busy; and you are to thank him for the grapes and for the flowers. What does Mr. Incledon want, coming so often? He was here only yesterday, and sat for hours with mamma. Oh! what a ghost you look, Rose! Shall I bring you some tea?" "It is too early for tea. Never mind; my head is better." "But you have had no dinner," said practical Agatha; "it is not much wonder that you are pale." Rose did not know what she answered, or if she said anything. Her head seemed to swim more than ever. Not only was it all true about Mr. Incledon, but she was going to talk to him to decide her own fate finally one way or other. What a good thing the drawingroom was so dark in the afternoon that he could not remark how woebegone she looked, how miserable and pale! cried. In his presence Rose felt so young and childish, it seemed impossible to believe in the extraordinary change of positions which his words implied. "But I must speak so. Miss Damerel, I am very conscious of my deficiencies by your side of the disparity between us in point of age and in many other ways; you, so fresh and untouched by the world, I affected by it, as every man is more or less; but if you will commit your happiness to my hands, don't think, because I am not so young as you, that I will watch over it less carefully that it will be less precious in my eyes." -- "Ah! I was not thinking of my happiness," said Rose; "I suppose I have no more right to be happy than other people-but oh! if you would let me speak to you! Mr. Incledon, oh! why should you want me? There are so many girls better, more like you, that would be glad. Oh! what is there in me? I am silly; I am not well educated, though you may think so. I am not clever enough to be a companion you would care for. I think it is because you don't know." 66 Mr. Incledon was so much taken by surprise that he could do nothing but laugh faintly at this strange address. was not thinking either of education or of wisdom, but of you-only you," he said. "But you know so little about me; He got up when she came in, and went you think I must be nice because of papa; up to her eagerly, putting out his hands.but papa himself was never satisfied with I suppose he took her appearance as a me. I have not read very much. I proof that his suit was progressing well; | know very little. I am not good for anyand, indeed, he had come to-day with the determination to see Rose, whatever might happen. He took her hand into both of his, and for one second pressed it fervently and close. "It is very kind of you to see me. How can I thank you for giving me this opportunity?" he said. "Oh, no! not kind; I wished it," said Rose, breathlessly, withdrawing her hand as hastily as he had taken it; and then, fearing her strength, she sat down in the nearest chair, and said, falteringly, "Mr. Incledon, I wanted very much to speak to you myself." "And I, too," he said her simplicity and eagerness thus opened the way for him and saved him all embarrassment "I, too, was most anxious to see you. I did not venture to speak of this yesterday, when I met you. I was afraid to frighten and distress you; but I have wished ever since that I had dared" "Oh, please do not speak so!" she where but home. Mr. Incledon, I am sure you are deceived in me. This is what I wanted to say. Mamma does not see it in the same light; but I feel sure that you are deceived, and take me for something very different from what I am," said Rose, totally unconscious that every word she said made Mr. Incledon more and more sure that he had done the very thing he ought to have done, and that he was not deceived. "Indeed, you mistake me altogether," he said. "It is not merely because you are a piece of excellence-it is because I love Rose." you, "Love me! Do you love me?" she said, looking at him with wondering eyes; then drooping with a deep blush under his gaze" but I - I do not love you." "I did not expect it; it would have been too much to expect; but if you will let me love you, and show you how I love you, dear!" said Mr. Incledon, going up |
