THE OPIUM CURSE 53 



astonishment at first to encounter some lean and 

 scraggy old toiler, his business apparent in the hoe 

 upon his shoulder, benevolently gazing through 

 such monstrosities, when it seems that he should 

 rather be poring over some learned tome in the 

 quiet refuge of a library. 



The 1st and 15th of the month are feast days, 

 and we met, during one day's march, a curious 

 crowd of old ladies, hobbling with the aid of 

 dragon-crutched sticks to the temple to pray. 

 They looked, in the distance, for all the world 

 like some queer kind of wading bird, with their 

 tapering limbs and stilted, mechanical action. 



Sometimes in the crowd who swarmed around 

 our halting-places we saw a face wearing the 

 sallow, sodden, hopeless look of some poor wretch 

 who had become an habitual eater of opium, which 

 is about five times worse than smoking it. In 

 spite of Imperial edicts, a certain amount of 

 land in out-of-the-way mountain regions, which 

 happen to be controlled by a slack Governor, is 

 under cultivation of the poppy. The yamen under- 

 lings, to whom the Governor trusts to bring him 

 information, are bribed, the Governor hoodwinked, 

 and the opium grown, as we saw from the bundles 

 of dried poppy-stalks, in various places. The crav- 

 ing for opium is about the greatest curse which 

 can fall upon a man. Its victim sticks at nothing 

 in his craving ; he will sell his land, his goods, his 

 wife or child, rather than be without it. We came 

 across one man who had originally been well-to-do 

 for a country man. He acquired the opium habit, 

 and when we saw him was a penniless beggar in 

 rags. He was quite happy, and refused Dr. Smith's 



