Arriving within 3 miles of Mukden, Wong engaged a passenger cart, a conveyance of the roughest description, which is only rendered tolerable by having its back, sides, and bottom padded with mattresses, and I was destitute of everything! Nothing can exaggerate the horrors of an unameliorated Chinese cart on an infamous road. Down into ruts 2 feet deep, out of which three fine mules could scarcely extricate us, over hillocks and big gnarled roots of trees, through quagmires and banked ditches, where, in dread of the awful jerk produced by the mules making a non-simultaneous jump up the farther side, I said to myself, “This is my last hour,” getting a blow on my head which made me see a shower of sparks--so I entered the gate of the outer wall of beaten clay 11¹⁄₂ miles in circuit which surrounds the second city of the empire. Then, through a quagmire out of which we were dragged by seven mules, I bruised, breathless, and in great pain, and up a bank where the cart turned over, pulled the mules over with it, and rolled down a slight declivity, I found myself in the roof with the cameras on the top of me and my right arm twisted under me, a Chinese crowd curious to see the “foreign devil,” a vague impress of disaster in my somewhat dazed brain, and Wong raging at large! Then followed a shady compound ablaze with flowers, a hearty welcome at the house of Dr. Ross, the senior missionary of the Scotch U.P. Church, sweet homelike rooms in a metamorphosed Chinese house, a large shady bedroom replete with comforts, the immediate arrival of Dr. Christie, the medical missionary, who pronounced my arm-bone “splintered” and the tendons severely torn, and placed the limb in splints, and a time of kind and skilled nursing by Mrs. Ross, and of dreamy restfulness, in which the horrors of the hold of the “pea-boat” and of the dark and wind-driven flood only served to emphasize the comfort and propitiousness of my surroundings. [Illustration: PASSENGER CART, MUKDEN.] CHAPTER XVI MUKDEN AND ITS MISSIONS