He was mounted on a diminutive pony, which he straddled in a clumsy fashion, his legs almost touching the ground; while a parasol he held aloft in one hand nearly poked my eyes out when he came up every now and then alongside my cage, to see that I was there all right and had not wriggled out of my bonds since his last inspection. If I could not speak, like the monkeys in the Zoological Gardens, I thought the more; all sorts of curious fancies continually coming into my head as we were thus borne along. For one thing, I was not in the least frightened about my fate; for, as the old chap had not killed us at the first start off, it occurred to me that he had merely taken us prisoners with the view of getting a heavy ransom for us by-and-by, being led to the belief that we might be important personages on account of his seeing us followed after we landed from the gunboat, by the cutter's crew. Our stalwart bluejackets appeared to his little, rat eyes, no doubt, like the retinue of a mandarin with a peacock's feather in his tail at the least; and this impression had, probably, been confirmed by the fact of our being such young fellows, which was a proof of what "big" men we would be when grown-up! Thinking this, I was in no ways alarmed. On the contrary, I chuckled greatly when I recollected what a widely different value the captain or first lieutenant would attach to a couple of harum-scarum midshipmen to the estimation in which this wily old kidnapper evidently held us; glorying in the great sell awaiting him when he came in his bland innocence to exchange our poor carcases for hard cash! This anticipation so pleased me, that I began to interest myself in the scenes through which we passed to our as yet unknown destination. The one great drawback to my enjoyment of this amusement was that there was precious little to look at, the country being fiat and dreary in the extreme, and consisting apparently of an endless plain, dotted here and there with heaps of earth, like mud-pies magnified, with the black Peiho serpentining through it in its snake-like curves. Such are the surroundings of Tientsin, which means "A heavenly spot!" Burying places we met with at regular intervals, for we could easily tell what they were from the ends of the square box coffins peeping out of the soil that only half covered them, while the bones of the departed frequently covered the earthy track our conductors traversed, which it would have been a vile libel to have called a road. Occasionally, we came near a collection of huts, with conical roofs resembling the form of the extinguisher usually employed in connection with a bedroom candlestick.