THOSE, who passed by Taku in the old days, probably rarely landed to visit the little community at Pilot Town. Yet there the pilots, who guide the steamers across the two mile wide Taku Bar, live, and—though, as wicked rumour has it, often doing their best to kill themselves—do not die, so healthy is the air. Anyhow, whatever rumour says, the pilots had made a very ship-shape little colony for themselves. Their houses had mostly mud walls and mud roofs like those of the neighbouring Chinese villages, but how clean and tidy mud walls can look when freshly whitewashed people must go to Pilot Town to see, as also what a wonderful jauntiness can be given by a judicious mixture of coal tar and white paint on gate posts. Like a regular good old-fashioned, English country village round its green, Pilot Town is built round its lawn tennis ground. They had two courts when we visited the place, and there were actually benches, that seemed to belong to the community at large, where lookers-on could sit and watch the players. They boasted then of having thirteen ladies, and the manners of Pilot Town were said already to have greatly changed under their softening influence. They had their Jubilee too, and though they did not boast that theirs was the loveliest in all the world, like Shanghai and Peking, yet they seemed to have thoroughly enjoyed it, “A picnic, and a supper, and a dance. We should not think anything of anything in North China that did not wind up with a dance.”

ONE of the great excitements in Chinese city life is when a great traveller comes by. Then for a few days at least we all sit at his feet and offer tribute of all our local knowledge and stored-up experience of many years, asking in return for that lively interest we never get from people who live in China, and who almost all seem to grow like the Chinese, apathetic, asking also for some accounts of his past, where he has travelled, what he has seen or done, for all of which there is such ample leisure as one can never find in world centres. Thus we sometimes think on our occasions we enjoy a fuller, richer intercourse with distinguished people than would be possible elsewhere except under similar circumstances. Most of these travellers are already well known to be collecting materials for their books, which all in due course have appeared and enriched the world's stock of knowledge, but two, who had specially strange tales to tell, have written no books, and as they seem never likely to do so I think some account of their wonderful experiences would be very accept able to the general reader. The one is Miss Annie Taylor, at that time an Associate of the China Inland Mission. She passed through Chungking in the spring on her way home from Tibetan voyagings, which had extended over nearly a year, the greater and most difficult portion of her journey having been made in the depth of winter.

IT is a question whether the true story of the Szu-ehuan riots of 1895 will ever be known. No inquiry has ever yet been made into any of the previous riots on the Yangtze — that is, no inquiry by a foreign commission; and to a Chinese inquiry no one who has resided in China would attach any importance. It invariably results in the beheading of a few needy coolies, a condemnation of the behaviour of the foreigners, especially if they have been killed and cannot speak for themselves, the persecution of all those who have stood their friends, and the removal— i.e., promotion—of the local officials. Ordinary Chinese— that is, the man in the street and his like — said these riots were neither anti-Christian nor anti-foreign, but all to “let the Emperor know and Japan man know,” but especially the Emperor, “that China man, he no likee —too muchee cross.” Well-informed foreigners say much the same—that it is all a bit of party politics, the Hunan men, represented to us in England by the late Marquis Tseng, who were then out of power, wanting to turn out the Ngan-hui men, Li Hung Chang and his gang, and adopting these means of getting them into difficulties. The Hunan men, who may be called the patriotic party, are naturally anti-foreign. It may be remembered the late Marquis Tseng could never return to Hunan after his friendliness with English people.

IT is a little sad to have to own that anti-footbinding seems much farther advanced in languid, sunshiny Macao than in bustling Hong- Kong. Of course the Portuguese have been established there for centuries, and they mix with the people and inter-marry as we do not. It may be that which makes the difference. But some say a doctor, a leading member of the reform party, has made the change at Macao. There on the Pray a, a miniature Bay of Naples, with the exceptionally romantic public gardens at one end and the Governor's palace at the other, the Portuguese band making music in the evenings, the waves lapping on the shore, mothers walking out with their children round them, as we never seem to see English mothers in the East, and young girls with their duennas, there in Macao several of the best European houses are occupied by Chinese, and in one, conspicuous with heavily-gilded railings, I was delighted to find that all the children were growing up unbound. Mr Ho Sui Tin, the leading Chinese of Macao, and a Portuguese subject, not only arranged a Chinese meeting for me to address, but took me home to his house afterwards and assured me one of his little girls was about shortly to be unbound. But though they had every luxury in the way of costly and artistic furnishing, even to a billiard table, on which they said they played, it was sad to see the elder daughters with their bound feet. He had not however been a member of the Reform Doctor's Society.

THE question of missionaries is always à l'ordre du jour in China, and the question of the day before the Boxer uprising was distinctively cheap missionaries. For that missionaries of some sort or other have come, are coming and will continue to come, must appear certain to all who are acquainted with the interior of China. Whether it is better to have one missionary backed by a salary of, say, two hundred pounds a year, or to have four missionaries struggling against the Chinese climate and the difficulties of the Chinese language on a doubtful fifty pounds a year or less is there the point debatable. How they do it is the question. The China Inland Mission gives its members house-rent. But they have to find everything else, food, clothes, medicines, travelling expenses, books or tracts to give away, together with salaries of Chinese assistants. Mr Horsburgh says he can live on ten dollars a month. We find our Chinese coolie reckons his food alone costs him $4 65 for a month of thirty-one days. That leaves $5.35 for everything else per month. But how an English gentleman accustomed to the generous fare of old England is to keep alive even on what sustains a Chinese coolie is again a difficulty. During one summer we had the pleasure of visiting several mission stations in the West of China, both those of the Roman Catholics, to whom most travellers award lavishly the praise they deny to missionaries of their own Church, and those of the China Inland, and of Mr Horsburgh's new Church Mission.

IN July 1895, when we heard the Taotai, who had so determinedly adopted every means within his power of enforcing order, was summoned to Peking, when we saw the grand arches at the Gate of Great Peace to welcome the Viceroy corning from Chentu, and did not know who might not come in his train, but knew that Chentu was once again placarded with anti-foreign placards, although there was no longer a foreigner there, we felt as if we had good reason to feel afraid. The examinations were to begin in live days. People said, though it seems incredible, that twenty thousand students or thereabouts might be expected. That means at least sixty thousand men, mostly between nineteen and thirty, might be expected in Chungking in the course of the next few days, counting them and their attendants. Many of them would, of course, be believing the bad reports that had been lately placarded about foreigners, many must be at least a little excited by the thought of how American and English men had scuttled and run before them. It must be conceded we nations of the West had hardly taken up a dignified position in the west of China, and that it would be hard for any Government to ensure order amongst such a band of new-comers, men who had heard all about the riots, and could not thereby have been led to feel more afraid of foreigners.