also personally visits the thirty-six schools established
within the province, where some 400 children are taught,
with five* orphanages of about 100 children each, the
entire cost of which amounts to barely £450, and all
this, I was told, is not the twentieth part of the good
work done by the French Mission all over China at a
very small cost. One cannot speak too highly of their
labour of pure Christian love, both in China and in
India. In the latter country I have seen them at
work during the late famine, when they likewise
established orphanages in certain centres and worked
with an iron will which saved thousands of lives.
There is an enormous amount of mendicity and
leprosy at Canton, and local institutions are quite
inadequate to cope with the evil. There is a large
hospital, a most wretched place, with room for about
a thousand old men or patients. Here each inmate
sleeps under the shadow of his own open coffin, which
he may fill on the morrow; but Chinamen contemplate
death with the most wonderful stoicism, and it is a
common habit with them to provide a coffin, for the
rich made of camphor or cedar-wood, during their lifetime.
Another kind of hospital exists for the dead, consisting
of several narrow alleys with small chambers,
where for twelve shillings a month a coffin can be
deposited until a suitable burial-ground has been prepared
outside the city walls, or until the necessary
funds for its removal have been obtained. Each of
these rooms contains a rude altar, on which flowers
and burning incense are placed, and sometimes an
image of Buddha, where the relations of the deceased
come to pray. I t is difficult to believe that these are
the same people who so cruelly, punish and torture
their prisoners for the slightest offence, and amongst
whom infanticide is no crime.
The prison of Canton is a forbidding sight,—mere
kennels and bamboo cages for cells, filthy beyond description,
and the prisoners laden with heavy chains
and a long iron pole attached to the latter, the very
weight of which prevents their moving about beyond
a crawl. The torture-chamber contains a collection
of instruments none but a most refined cruelty could
have invented. Just outside the prison gates there
are gambling hells which these wretches frequent, and
where many a dark crime is said to be committed.
Whilst the poor are tortured to extract truth or confession,
the rich man is admitted to the oath by
decapitating a cock as a' symbol,—“ May my head be
cut off like that of a cock if I perjure.”
A pleasanter visit is that to the examination hall,
composed of a long gallery with rows of cells on either
tr