We were so charmed with the city of Liao Yang, that it required small persuasion to induce us to return there a month later in order to visit the neighbouring mountains of Chang Shan (a thousand peaks), and I shall let the account of it follow the present chapter. It was the last week in April, and all the fruit-trees and the elms were bursting into blossom and leaf, as we walked from the station outside the gate to the mission premises within it, embowered among orchards, and the scent of lilac filling the air. The mission gardens were beginning to show signs of the loveliness which has won them a well-deserved reputation among travellers, and we returned like old friends to our former quarters. Life on the mission field soon cements friendship, and medical mission work must appeal even to the stubbornest heart. We had already visited the two hospitals, models of practical, unostentatious usefulness, with the excellent native staff trained by Dr. Westwater, whose name is a household word in the land. To him was due the fact that the town was saved from the horrors of bombardment by the Russian troops, and one has but to walk through the streets of Liao Yang with him to see how universal is the respect in which he is held. There are various temples of different religions in Liao Yang, and we visited the Temple of Hell, where are depicted all the horrors of future punishment, than which nothing could be more ghastly than the Chinese conception. The grotesqueness of their realistic execution in coloured plaster fortunately took away some of the gruesomeness, and in one of the side shrines we found the extraordinary figure of the popular deity, called the “Ten Parts Imperfect One.” The sketch in Chapter XII. hardly does justice to the hideousness of the figure, which represents the main woes to which flesh is heir in China—lameness, blindness, dropsy, harelip, boils, &c. &c., and to this deity the people come to pray in all cases of sickness. [Illustration: BLIND BUDDHIST NUN]