CHAPTER XXV

Summary

THE road was shockingly bad, and our leg and spirit-worn ponies floundered about in the holes in a very jeopardising style, until some time near one o'clock in the morning we came to a roadside halting-house, and knocking up the inmates got them to give the animals some hay, while we lay down in our travelling costume on a dry bit of ground outside to rest until daylight broke, when we might finish so much of our enterprise and be again among countrymen.

We were so thoroughly beaten by fatigue, that I much doubt if even the threats and fierce hullaballoos of the Newchwang rabble would have readily roused us. We obtained at least three hours' sleep before we were disturbed by the villagers getting ready to go to their fields, the clattering of ponies' hoofs, and the teeth-tingling screed of the plough-cradle along the dusty way.

‘Merry larks are ploughmen's clocks’ applies as truly to the Chinese tiller of the soil as to the more scientific furrowmaker under the Western heavens; for the lark and the ploughman must have left their beds nearly together that morning, and were both hastening to their chosen scene of industry—the one in cloud-land, the other in the parched-up glebe or fallow field.

We hurled ourselves rapidly along a tolerably good and wide highway, with, on each side, a well-cultivated country, but as the sun got higher and higher the heat became very intense and stupefying, and in our famished state we felt it more than we had done for some days.