well fed, and well clothed. Food is plentiful and cheap, and the excellence of the winter roads makes it possible to import goods readily from the coast. The character of the people will have been gathered from the previous narrative. They are certainly not attractive to strangers, and at the end of a journey one leaves them without regret ; but they have this good quality of industry—they are persevering in their efforts at colonization, and thrifty in their habits.
Two days before Christmas, Fulford and I had to start for Tientsin. It was rather a wrench to have to leave our friends just before Christmas in this way, but I thought it possible that we might just reach Tientsin before the river was closed, and so be able to get away down the coast at once. Christmas Day we spent in a Chinese inn. We, of course, had a plum-pudding, which had been presented to us by our friends, and some wine in which to drink the health of those at home, and certainly it had been a great satisfaction to me to have been able to telegraph home from Newchwang our safe return from our journey, so that now at Christmas-time they might feel no uneasiness on my account.
We passed nothing of interest till we reached Shan-hai-kuan, the point where the Great Wall of China begins, or ends, in the sea. This was a sight really worth seeing. A line of hills between two or three thousand feet in height, stretched from inland close down to the seashore ; and all along these heights, as far as the eye could reach, ran this wonderful wall, going down the side of one hill, up the next, over its summit and down the other side again, and then at the end coming finally, down and plunging right into the sea till the waves washed the end of it. It was no trumpery little wall, nor such a wall for instance, as one sees round a modern prison, but a regular castle wall, such as they built in the Middle Ages round their strongest castles, thirty or forty feet high, of solid stone, and fifteen feet or so thick, wide enough for two carriages to drive
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