for a brief space enjoying the comfort and cleanliness of an English home and the pleasant society of fellow-countrymen.
The country all round looks bare and brown, plough land, some of which is irrigated, covering the plain. On all sides, filling in the distance, rise mountains of a ruddy- coloured soil. Maize is the chief grain produced, and as soon as it is harvested, poppy is sown. This is, of course, by far the most valuable crop which the province produces, Yün-nan opium having a particularly good name; and the farmers were said to be in a state of nervous irritation owing to a belief on their part that the authorities were actually thinking of taking steps to reduce the cultivation of the poppy, in accordance with the recently issued proclamation at Peking. Nor was this reflex of the anti-opium movement—of which more anon—the only symptom of that curious, indefinable, yet palpable process of change which is making itself apparent even in the most remote corners of the Chinese empire, and which promises "nothing short of the complete renovation of the oldest, most popu-
