length. The tiger-hunters form what may be called a brigade or corps, and may be called on for military service. They were conspicuous objects in the _Kur-dong_, with their long matchlock guns, loose blue uniforms, and conical-crowned, broad-brimmed hats. The tiger appears on the Royal standard, and tigers’ skins are the insignia of high office, the leopard skins, indicating lower rank. The Chinese give a very high price for tigers’ bones as a medicine, considering them a specific for strength and courage. Tiger-hunting as a business seems confined to the northern provinces. On the Han, and specially along its northern affluents, are found three if not four species of deer, and the horns, in the velvet, of the large deer (_Cervus Manchuricus_), which fetch from forty to sixty dollars a pair, are the prize most wanted by the hunters. Pheasants are literally without number and are very tame; I constantly saw them feeding among the crops within a few yards of the peasants at their work. They are usually brought down by falcons, which, when well trained, command as high a price as nine dollars. To obtain them three small birds are placed in a cylinder of loosely woven bamboo, mounted horizontally on a pole. On the peregrine alighting on this, a man who has been concealed throws a net over the whole. The bird is kept in a tight sleeve for three days. Then he is daily liberated in a room, and trained to follow a piece of meat pulled over the floor by a string. At the end of a week he is taken out on his master’s wrist, and slipped when game is seen. He is not trained to return. The master rushes upon him and secures him before he has time to devour the bird. A man told me that he sometimes got between twenty and thirty pheasants a day, but had to walk or run 100 _li_ to do it. The season was nearly over, yet I bought fine pheasants on the Han for threepence and fourpence each. They were cheaper than chickens.