S soon as the Viceroy took his leave, the "Richmond" steamed slowly up the coast, for the purpose of visiting the Great Wall of China. It had been proposed to make this journey overland, and see also the tombs of the Ming dynasty. But we were under the cruel stress of unusually warm weather, and our journeys to the Temple of Heaven, the city walls, and other temples, had been attended with unusual discomfort. It was our good fortune to have a smooth sea, and when the morning came we found ourselves steaming slowly along the shores of Northern China. Navigation in the China seas is always a problem, and the coast along which we were sailing is badly surveyed. As a general thing, so carefully has science mapped and tracked the ocean that you have only to seek counsel from a vagrant, wandering star, and you will be able to tell to the minute when some hill

THE GREAT WALL.

or promontory will rise out of the waves.

435 There was no such

If

comfort on the China coast, and the "Richmond" had to feel her way, to grope along the coast and find the Great Wall as best we could. Fortunately the day was mild and clear, and we could steam close to shore. All the morning we sailed watching the shore, the brown, receding hills, the leaping, jutting masses of rock, the bits of greenery that seemed to rejoice in the sun, the fishing villages in houses of clay that run toward the shore. It was a lonely sea. Heretofore, in our cruise on the China coast, we had been burdened with company. The coasting track is so large that junks were always in sight, junks and fishing-boats and all manner of strange, clumsy craft. you are used to travel on the vast seas, where a sail a week is a rapture, this presence of many ships is a consolation. It takes away the selfishness of sea life and makes you think that you are a part of the real world. But it is at the same time a trial to the sailor. The junk is an awkward, stupid trap, and always crossing your bows or edging up against you. The Chinaman thinks it good luck to cross your bows, and if he can do so with a narrow shave, just giving you a clip with his rudder as he passes, he has had a joyous adventure. While creeping up the China coast we were always on the watch for junks, but never ran one down. It was trying, however, to naval patience, and we found it so much better to be alone on the sea and look for our Great Wall as well as we could, undisturbed by the heedlessness of Chinese mariners.

About two o'clock in the afternoon Lieutenant Sperry, the navigator, had an experience that must have reminded him of Columbus discovering America. He had found the Great Wall. By careful looking through the glasses, in time we saw it-a thick, brown, irregular line that crumbled into the sea. The Richmond" steamed toward the beach, and so gracious was the weather that we were able to anchor within a mile of shore. All the boats were let down, and as many as could be spared from the vessel went ashore-the captain, the officers, sailors in their blue, tidy uniforms, and an especial sailor with a pot of white paint to inscribe the fact that the "Richmond"

had visited the Great Wall. The Great Wall is the only monument I have seen which could be improved by modern sacrilege, and which could be painted over and plastered without compunctions of conscience. From what I read of this stupendous achievement it was built under the reign of a Chinese emperor who flourished two centuries before Christ.

This emperor was disturbed by the constant invasion of the Tartars, a hardy nomadic race, who came from the hills of Mongolia, and plundered his people, who were indeed afterward to come, if only the emperor could have opened the book of fate and known, and rule the country and found the dynasty which exists, after a fashion, still. So his majesty resolved to build a wall which should forever protect his empire from the invader. The wall was built, and so well was it

done that here we

come, wanderers from the antipodes, twenty centuries after, and find it still a substantial, imposing, but in the light of modern science a useless wall. It is 1,250 miles in length, and it is only when you consider that distance and the incredible amount of labor it imposed that the magnitude of the work breaks upon you. We landed on a smooth, pebbly beach, studded with