The postal system is a fine piece of organization: it reaches to the utmost bounds of the empire, and although the mails are mainly carried by runners on foot, they travel very rapidly. The stages are not long, and there is no delay when the bags are handed from one runner to the next. For instance, we were told that on this particular road, what we did in seventeen days the mails would do in four, and we did an average of eighteen miles a day. We had postal maps given us of the provinces we were going to visit. On them are marked all the postal stations, with the distances from one to another; the line of route; the various grades of offices; the limit of the district; daily or bi-daily day and night service; daily, bi-daily or tri-daily service; less frequent ones; postal connexion by boat; telegraphic connexion; rural box offices, etc. The names of the main towns are in both Chinese and English, the others only in Chinese. On the whole, letters travel wonderfully safely. The old postal system was quite hopeless, and in the interior the missionaries used to organize their own. Even Peking used to be closed to the rest of the world yearly for several months. I remember six months when we had no letters from my sister in Shansi, due to a misunderstanding at a transmitting station, and there was no telegraphic communication in those days. Now the old Chinese system has practically died out. We had another proof of the thoughtfulness of the Chinese commissioner later. Having heard from one of the missionaries that we were going into the Miao country before coming to the capital, he sent up all our letters, a tremendous boon after being weeks without any. The postal service is under international control, having been originated in 1896 and built up by Sir Robert Hart in connexion with the customs: in each province there is a commissioner; nearly all are Europeans. As we got further into the province the vegetation grew more and more luxuriant. The banks were carpeted with lycopodium and primula and the hedges were full of roses, white and yellow jasmine, hawthorn, clematis montana, Akebia lobata—a very curious creeper with wine-coloured blossom, both male and female. The brilliant yellow-blossomed cassia forms a most impenetrable hedge, with upstanding thorns, like nails, all along its tough stems. We tied water jars into our chairs, so as to keep the flowers fresh, and by the end of the day the chairs were perfect bowers, our men vying with one another to get us the choicest blossoms. Perhaps the most beautiful of any was the large white, sweet-scented rhododendron, the Hymenocallis. This is rare; we only found it once.