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 



