covered with lime, mixed with fragments of glass and pottery, in order to keep pigs and dogs from digging up the bodies. How the people subsist here it is hard to say! Judging from the multitude of graves they must die in great numbers, and who can wonder at it, in an atmosphere that smells so putrid. I looked into one or two of the dwellings; they were single- roomed huts reared above the naked sod. Often they contained no furniture at all, and their ragged lean occupants were filthy in the extreme; and yet numerous children were to be seen running about, pitching pebbles into the pools, or chasing the pigs and pariah dogs to prevent them from eating up the only article of trade in the locality.
There was another hill not far off, and commanding a view of the harbour. On this I found a row of glazed earthen pots, each containing a skeleton; one had been broken and the bones lay scattered over the face of the rock, while a number of children were playing catch-ball with the skull. What mean these dis- honoured reUcs, over which some Ezekiel might prophesy, lament- ing the degradation of his people.?* These are the remains deposited here to await interment— a ceremony which can only be properly accomplished by attending to the times and places which the professors of Feng-shui may prescribe. But alas 1 too many of these unsepulchred skeletons will never know any resting-place more hallowed than the pots in which they were originally stored. There they crumble, unfriended and forgotten, for their surviving kinsmen are perhaps themselves cut off from the land, or else too poor to pay the expenses of the for ever deferred burial rites. Now, then, my readers can appreciate the true motives of a Chinaman, who, as I have already said, will devote his earnings to the purchase of a coffin, funeral raiment and a burial site in anticipation, many years before his death.
