On the French side it was even worse—nothing but an endless bleak tract of mud, flush with the filthy water, all of one colour with the land, so that it was hard to say where the mud ended and the sea began, and even the wild fowl seemed sad and desolate, and I wondered why, having wings, they did not fly to some more cheerful home. No more filthy little stream than the Pei Ho ever defiled a sea. As I wrote at the time: “Mud forts, mud houses, mud fields, and a muddy river discharging its daily burthen of mud into a muddy sea—everything is mud.” It is difficult for water, especially running water, to be ugly and uninteresting, but the Pei Ho accomplished that feat. Higher up the stream there were some stunted trees and green fields, but the country was utterly dull and featureless. The navigation of the river was difficult enough; perpetually shifting mud-banks in mid-stream made the channel as crooked and uncertain as Chinese diplomacy. Several times we collided with junks, and on more than one occasion our pilot had to send men ashore with a hawser which they fastened round a willow tree to let the ship swing. She was a queer little tramp, stout enough and fast enough, as times went, for she could do her eight knots, and perhaps a half, in the open sea, but the strangest thing about her was that, although nominally belonging to a German firm, she was really owned by a Chinese merchant in Tientsing, to whom the whole of her cargo was consigned. That fifty years ago the Chinese, so stiff-backed against all that was European, should have owned a foreign-built steam tramp seems almost incredible. But the little _Yün tsě fei_, “Walkee all same fly,” as a Chinaman translated her name, did her little commercial patrol of the Gulf of Pei-chi-li with great regularity. I found Tientsing holiday-making. Saurin, my old friend and colleague, had come down from Peking for the races with M. Glinka, an attaché of the Russian Legation, and they were staying with M. Buitzow, the Russian Consul, who very kindly put me up also; I met him again eight years later, on the occasion of my second visit to Japan in 1873—a very agreeable man.