MORE CRUISING AFTER PIRATES. 349 



Mandarin offered to take him, educate him, and make 

 him a Mandarin in time ; but until I left China, not- 

 withstanding these tempting offers, I kept him. Girls 

 and boys in China are looked upon as two very dif- 

 ferent articles, the former being comparatively of no 

 value. The baby towers, or deep pits in some in- 

 stances, which are found near all large Chinese cities, 

 receive, as a rule, only girl children, which are flung 

 into these receptacles and allowed to die. I had a vivid 

 description of one of these places by a Chinese artist, in 

 the shape of a print, wherein the poor, wretched little 

 new-born babies were shown being torn to pieces by 

 snakes, dogs, etc. The mother of one of the children 

 was gazing over the side of the pit, watching her two 

 or three days' old child being fought over by several 

 brutes of dogs. 



During the China War in 1856, a few days after 

 we had taken the last fort near the Boca Tigris, some 

 midshipmen roaming about the fields behind the fort 

 in quest of quail or pigeon, came upon an earthen- 

 ware chatty, and looking in, found it contained a baby 

 girl, alive and kicking. She was brought on board at 

 once, when the doctor pronounced her only two days' 

 old. What was to be done with her ; the demand for 

 the poor little motherless thing was very great. The 



