It was a stroke of luck falling in with Saurin, for we left Tientsing together the next day and so I had a friend under whose auspices I was able to reach Peking in far greater comfort than I could have expected. We wriggled up the ugly corkscrew stream in three boats; up one reach we had the wind with us, in the next it would be dead against us, and we could only get along by towing and punting. The shoals were as innumerable as ever and so we were constantly crossing the river along a course mapped out by twigs of willow stuck in the mud. However, at last, at two in the afternoon of Sunday the twenty-first, we reached Tungchou—famous for the tragedy of the capture of the English prisoners in 1860—and outside the walls of the city, under the pleasant shade of a great tree by a wayside inn, we found our horses and an escort which had been sent to meet us. My horse was a grey Arab that had been the charger of my gallant friend Colonel Fane of Fane’s Horse who, like my friend now of more than half a century, Sir Dighton Probyn, had played a conspicuous part in the war of 1860. The country between Tungchou and Peking is absolutely flat, very populous, with many villages and endless graveyards, the most sacred of all objects to the Chinaman. There are plenty of fine trees and a wealth of greenery in the richly cultivated fields, so that I was rather agreeably surprised, for I had expected nothing so refreshing to the eye: to be sure, it was the early summer, before the scorching heats and long droughts had come to tan the crops to one uniform brown. All of a sudden, at a turn of the road close in front of us, quite unsuspected, invisible until we were immediately under it, I saw before me the city of Peking, the city of my dreams. There at last were the grim, dark grey walls just as I had fancied them, formidable, frowning; behind them the mystery of centuries. At intervals rose the great towers, rearing their fantastic roofs with curved eaves above huge gates in and out of which the yellow crowds were hurrying, jostling, eagerly busy. Coolies carrying their burdens at each end of a bamboo pole slung across one shoulder, merchants, small gentry, carts tenanted, some by mandarins surrounded by retainers with their red-tasselled caps, others by much-painted ladies with gaudy ornaments in the edifices of their quaintly-dressed, shining black hair; old women in charge of babies; a prisoner guarded by two jailers, his head protruding out of the heavy wooden _cangue_; the beggars, quite worthy of their fame for filth and repulsiveness—just such a crowd as existed in Kång Hsi’s time two hundred years ago, nothing changed, save that the city has grown a little more shabby, with more ruined spaces caused by fire and neglect in a country where nothing is ever repaired; above all, a whole series of seemingly familiar pictures—the rice-paper drawings of my childhood in the flesh!