Perseverance, and a mule car, brought the travellers to Kai-foung-fou. They found there many Mahometans, openly exercising right of conscience, and flying their religion on a flag displayed over their gate. These Mahometans are, for the most part, hotel-keepers, and with one of them our heroes lodged. Of him they began asking about Cut-Nerves. Mine host of the Crescent said there were still some Jews in Kai-foung-fou, and offered himself as a cicerone to their synagogue. Thither they went. They found its outer wall in ruins; briers and dirt filled the grand entrance; "the pillars of the building, the inscribed marbles, the stone balustrade, before the peristyle of the temple, the ornamental sculpture--all were cracked, broken, and overturned." Under the wings of the synagogue, the chapels built in honor of the patriarchs--nestled together, cold and naked, sleeping on the bare stones, those objects of our European interest, "the Jews in China." Poor and miserable as they are, they had begun to sell the stones of their temple for bread, and a portion of land within their sacred inclosure had been already sold to an adjacent temple of the Buddhists. Still, there were the cylinders inclosing the sacred rolls of the Old Testament, which, luckily, had not proved eatable. In number, these rolls were about a dozen, each thirty feet long by three feet wide. They are of white sheep-skin, inscribed with very small Hebrew characters. For fifty years these poor Jews have been without the guidance of a rabbi, and there is not one left who can read a word of Hebrew. In a dozen years, probably, the last trace of the Jews in China will expire. The travellers gave money to the mournful congregation in the synagogue, and received leave to copy the inscriptions, about which the Jesuits had previously informed us. Moreover, they obtained, and have brought home, eight Hebrew manuscripts; six contain portions of the Old Testament, namely, of Exodus, chapters 1-6, and 38-40; of Leviticus, chapters 19, 20; of Numbers, chapters 13, 14, 15; of Deuteronomy, chapters 11-16, and chapter 32; with portions of the Pentateuch, the Psalms, and Prophets. The other two manuscripts are of the Jewish Liturgy. The leaves of these manuscripts "are of a species of card-board, on which the words, as it were, are engraved with a point; the binding is in silk, and bears evident marks of being of foreign origin. Two Israelitish merchants, to whom these books were shown at Shanghae, spoke of having seen similar ones at Aken, and the presence here and there upon the margins of Persian words, interspersed with Hebrew annotations, seemed to indicate that the books came originally from some western country of Asia, perhaps Persia, or some of the high provinces of India, where Persic has from time immemorial been the language used among people of education. Although the annotations mentioned are numerous, and apparently referring to different epochs, no trace of any Chinese character is to