First comes his garden, melancholy in the April twilight. It lies between walls of gray brick, and is very much shut in for a town already so walled. Gray also is the rockwork outlining the small squares or lozenges, where big red, lavender, and pink peonies flourish. These, unlike our own, are very fragrant, and to-night fill the air of this gloomy enclosure with an excessive odor. There are also rows of little porcelain jars inhabited by tiny fish--regular monstrosities--red fish or black fish with cumbersome fins and extravagant tails, giving the effect of a flounced petticoat; fish with enormous terrifying eyes, which protrude like those of the heraldic dragons and which are the result of I do not know what mysterious form of breeding. The Chinese, who torture the feet of their women, also deform their trees, so that they remain dwarfed and crooked. They train their fruits to resemble animals, and their animals to look like the chimæras of a dream. It is already dark in the prince's apartment, which looks out on this prison-like garden, and one sees little, on first entering, but draperies of red silk, long canopies falling from numerous "parasols of honor," which are open and standing upright on wooden supports. The air is heavy, saturated with opium and musk. There are deep red divans with silver pipes lying about for smoking the poison of which China is in a fair way to perish. The prince, who is twenty or twenty-two years old, is of a sickly ugliness, with divergent eyes; he is perfumed to excess, and dressed in pale silk in tones of mauve or lilac. * * * * * In the evening dinner with the mandarin, where the commandant of the French post, the prince, two or three notables, and one of my "confrères," a member of the Academy of China,--a mandarin with a sapphire button,--are the guests. Seated in heavy square arm-chairs, there are six or seven of us around a table decorated with small, exquisite, and unusual bits of old porcelain, so tiny as to seem to be part of a doll service. Red candles in high copper chandeliers give us our light. This very morning the entire province had orders to leave off the winter head-dress and to put on the summer one,--a conical affair, resembling a lamp-shade, from which fall tufts of reddish horse-hair or peacock's or crow's feathers, according to the rank of the wearer. And since it is the style to wear them at dinner, hats of this description make grotesque figures of the guests. As for the ladies of the house, they, alas, remain invisible, and it would be the worst possible breach of good form to ask for them or to refer to them in any way. It is well known that a Chinaman compelled to speak of his wife must refer to her in an indirect way, using, whenever possible, a qualifying term, devoid of all compliment, as, for example, "my offensive" or "my nauseating" wife.