Then in the same way that I have seen the Chinese doctors in Australia diagnose the ailments of their human patients of the same great family, he examined the poor mule with the inscrutable air of one to whom are unveiled the mysteries of futurity, and he retired with his fee.

The medicine came later in a large basket, and consisted of an assortment of herbs so varied that one at least might be expected to hit the mark.

My Laohwan paid the mule doctor, so he said, for advice and medicine 360 cash (ninepence), an exorbitant charge as prices are in China.
On Friday, April 13th, we had another pleasant day in open country, leading to the low rim of hills that border the plain and lake of Yunnan city.

Ruins everywhere testify to the march of the rebellion of thirty years ago--triumphal arches in fragments, broken temples, battered idols destroyed by Mohammedan iconoclasts.

Districts destitute of habitations, where a thriving population once lived, attest that suppression of a rebellion in China spells extermination to the rebels.
On the road I met a case of goitre, and by-and-by others, till I counted twenty or more, and then remembered that I was now entering on a district of Asia extending over Western Yunnan into Thibet, Burma, the Shan States, and Siam, the prevailing deformity of whose people is goitre.
[Illustration: THE BIG EAST GATE OF YUNNAN CITY.] Ten miles before Yunnan my men led me off the road to a fine building among the poplars, which a large monogram on the gateway told me was the Catholic College of the _Missions Etrangeres de Paris_, known throughout the Province as Jinmaasuh.