288 ARISTOCRATS OF THE GARDEN 



been lost and whole villages burnt to the ground, and 

 a Roman Catholic priest Pere Victorin brutally 

 murdered and his corpse barbarously mutilated. A 

 feeling of bitterness and hate still rankled and there 

 was grave danger of some untoward incident causing 

 the smouldering anger to blaze out afresh. Of all 

 this I was fully aware, but my mission was to obtain 

 Davidia involucrata and in furtherance of this I did 

 not think of causing trouble of any kind. 



Having arranged for my boat to journey some 

 fifty miles up-stream to Paishih I left Patung on the 

 morning of April 22d, and followed a paved steep 

 road. On the evening of the 23d idem. I reached the 

 Roman Catholic Mission station at Hsi-sha-ho and 

 found I was the first foreigner, save Roman Catholic 

 priests, to visit the place since Dr. Henry. I found 

 here a Belgian priest on a visit to his converts. He 

 courteous and scholarly, like all his class made 

 me welcome. He had been the companion of the 

 priest murdered two years before and he gave me a 

 full account of the whole tragedy. In his Bible he 

 carried a set of photographs of the late Pere's re- 

 mains gruesome, nauseating, and horrible to look 

 upon. The affair had taken place some fifteen miles 

 from Hsi-sha-ho and my host said he expected trouble 

 again this year, as, two weeks before, a party of 



