under the direction of a chief; they are nearly all musicians, and make the most hideous noises, which they call melody.  Anybody with a sensitive ear will pay them to move on where they will annoy somebody beside himself.  Many of the beggars are almost naked, and they attract attention by striking their hands against their hips and shouting at the top of their voices.  One day the wife of the French minister at Pekin gave some garments to those who were the most shabbily dressed; the next morning they returned as near naked as ever, and some of them entirely so.

Outside of the Tartar city there is a beggar’s lodging house, which bears the name of “the House of the Hen’s Feathers.”  It is a hall, with a floor of solid earth and a roof of thin laths caulked and plastered with mud.  The floor is covered with a thick bed of feathers, which have been gathered in the markets and restaurants of Pekin, without much regard to their cleanliness.  There is an immense quilt of thick felt the exact size of the hall, and raised and lowered by means of mechanism.  When the curfew tolls the knell of parting day, the beggars flock to this house, and are admitted on payment of a small fee.  They take whatever places they like, and at an appointed time the quilt is lowered.  Each lodger is at liberty to lie coiled up in the feathers, or if he has a prejudice in favor of fresh air, he can stick his head through one of the numerous holes that the coverlid contains.

A view of this quilt when the heads are protruding is suggestive of an apartment where dozens of dilapidated Chinese have been decapitated.  All night long the lodgers keep up a frightful noise; the proprietor, like the individual in the same business in New York, will tell you, “I sells the place to sleep, but begar, I no sells the sleep with it.”  The couch is a lively one, as the feathers are a convenient warren for a miscellaneous lot of living things not often mentioned in polite society.  In the southern cities of China one sees fewer women in the street than in the north.  Those that appear in public are always of the poorer classes, and it is rare indeed that one can get a view of the famous small-footed women.  The odious custom of compressing the feet is much less common at Pekin than in the southern provinces.  The Manjour emperors of China opposed it ever since their dynasty ascended the throne, and on several occasions they issued severe edicts against it.  The Tartar and Chinese ladies that compose the court of the empresses have their feet of the natural size, and the same is the case with the wives of many of the officials.  But such is the power of fashion that many of these ladies have adopted the theatrical slipper, which is very difficult to walk with.  No one can tell where the custom of compressing the feet originated, but it is said that one of the empresses was born with deformed feet, and set the fashion, which soon spread through the empire.  The jealousy of the men and the idleness and vanity of the women have served to continue the custom.  Every Chinese who can afford it will have at least one small-footed wife, and she is maintained in the most perfect indolence.  For a woman to have a small foot is to show that she is of high birth and rich family, and she would consider herself dishonored if her parents failed to compress her feet.