Author Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1906 Excerpt:... CHAPTER XXIX ON returning to the Interior, after the Boxer persecutions, we went to Chung-king; but at the commencement of 1902 my husband, leaving me there, journeyed alone into the province of Kuei-cheo to open a station at Tsen-i, 200 miles south of Chung-king. Twice during the previous twenty years the French priests had been driven out of it and their buildings destroyed, but as a far-reaching effect of the suppression of the U-man-tz rebellion, they were now firmly established in the old city of Tsen-i, for, like Kuei-yang, this place has an old city, and a new one, which are here separated by a shallow river about 100 yards wide. Meanwhile, Mr. Little had most kindly invited me and our two younger daughters to be his guests; and later on a small bungalow on the range of mountains opposite Chung-king was lent to us near the Friends' school, so the children attended it as day pupils and were afterwards left there as boarders. On the 4th June Mr. Little gave a tiffin in honour of the officers who had just brought the first two screw gunboats up the Gorges, to join the paddle wheel steamer "Pioneer," which he had navigated up to Chung-king four years previously. My husband happened to be back from Tsen-i, so we were all present at the tiffin, and while still at table telegraphic news came that peace had been proclaimed in South Africa. On my husband's arrival in Tsen-i Fu he had, of course, to put up at an inn, and two days afterwards noticed at the butcher's stall the hindquarters of an animal larger than a sheep but smaller than an ox, with a very long tail, and a few yards further on saw the front quarters, with the head, which looked like a tiger's, but perceived that round the extremities was a ring of spotted skin, and knew at once that it was a le...