created greater confusion. On entering the first court of Peh-kwei's yamun, we were saluted with guns, and standards were hoisted on the mandarin poles. These courts are large paved areas, with a very broad flag-path up the middle, and fine trees at the sides; they are divided from each other by vast wooden buildings, like barns, with Chinese roofs, and stone lions guarding them. The patient ingenuity of the makers is shown in these animals; they have a large ball in their mouths, which you can turn round behind the teeth, but cannot take out; it has evidently been cut from the solid. We rode through the centre of these barns, up the stairs, to a higher court beyond, but our attendants filed off round the sides; and then we dismounted, and were introduced to Peh-kwei. I had often seen him wagging his head, and tongue, and hands, in old china-shops; but now he stood upright, in a long, white silk peignoir: and then he and Mr. Parkes began bowing to one another in such continuity, that they looked wound up, and minutes elapsed before either of them would take a seat. Then tea was brought in, and for a little time the talk was exactly like the twaddle that passes at a morning call in England between people who don't care a straw about each other, never have, and are never likely to. But Mr. Parkes began to pull some Chinese documents from his pocket; and as I had been introduced as "a mandarin on his travels," Peh-kwei made a very lucky suggestion that I should see his grounds.
This was just what I wanted—liberty to invade what would have been deemed a privacy even by the Cantonese; but the acres of unkept, over-*grown wilderness, with its rotting pavilions, tumble-down temples, dried-up lakes, crumbling rockwork, and broken seats and tables, formed the spring of all the impressions I afterwards received in and about Canton. Nothing so dreary—not even Vauxhall on a wet Christmas Day—ever could be imagined. It was not the breakdown of acute organic lesion, but the decay of long, long-continued atrophy: and I formed a theory at the moment, which the appearance of every other yamun, or temple, strengthened, that the Chinese had for ages so jealously shut up their vaunted city, not from any terror of the barbarians becoming acquainted with their secrets of trade, government, or manufacture, but from a positive idea of shame that any one should see the mouldering neglected "lions" of their southern capital. True to the estimated value of their curios, everything was in a state of "crackle." Combine all you can call to mind of dreary places—Miss Linwood's old room in Leicester Square, and the present aspect of the Square itself; the gaunt, cheerless show-*rooms of palaces generally: the "Moated Grange" and "Haunted House;" the old pavilion on Monkey Island, and indeed "pavilions" generally, from that in Hans Place to any damp ceiling-stained summer-*house, dedicated to friendship or nature, that you know of—mix them together, and extract their essence, and then you will not have the least idea of the general rot and ruin that is spreading, like an ulcer, throughout Canton.
