such floggings, said that it was a difficult matter to avoid mortification setting in, and it was only with very careful treatment that they could be cured, the whole flesh having to slough away, being absolutely crushed and battered. Yet this strange people are so indifferent to these horrors, that even those who suffer will laugh amidst their sufferings. We were told the following tale, whether true or not I cannot say. A man was being bambooed for an offence, and astonished the officials by laughing all the time; the more he was flogged the harder he laughed, till at last those who were punishing him stopped to ask him the reason of his mirth. "You have got the wrong man," he said. It is always a comfort to have a keen sense of humour. I do not think there is anything more awful than the descriptions one has as to the indifference to suffering that is displayed by the average Chinaman. I remember a story told me by a sailor. As a ship {67} was being loaded, a man, obviously on the verge of death, came and asked for work, but failed to get it. Shortly after he was seen hanging about the ship, and at night they found him lying between some bales. He was turned out, but he constantly crept back, first to one place, then to another, till at last the sailor came to know his face quite well. One day, as the sailor went ashore, he was attracted by a little crowd looking at something, and this proved to be the poor fellow in his death struggle, lying in a gutter of water. He called the attention of a Chinese policeman to him. The Chinese policeman explained that he would move him when he was dead, as he had orders to remove all corpses, but that he could not move him while he was alive. Dr. Macklin of Nanking told us story after story of the way in which the Chinese would leave people in a dying condition on the road. A little time ago he had ridden into an old temple, and there he saw a man apparently asleep, but on looking at him more closely, he saw that his eyes were wide open and that the flies were walking right across his eyeballs, showing that he was quite insensitive. He called to one or two men and asked them to help him to carry this poor sufferer to some house near, but they could not or would not find a house to keep him in; and so in the end Dr. Macklin determined to take him straight back to Nanking, which he did. There he administered a very heavy dose of quinine hypodermically, with the result that the man soon showed {68} signs of returning consciousness. It was a case of malignant malaria, and had he not been found by Dr. Macklin, the man must have been eaten by wild dogs or have died from the disease; as it was he recovered, and proved to be a hard-working young farmer who was in search of work, as his home had been ruined by a local failure of crops. He had apparently contracted malaria, and owing to his poor and ill-nourished condition it had gone hardly with him.