of the bridge. The Woosung varies in width
here from one-half to three-fourths of a mile;
and, during the recent incursions of the Tai-pings,
it was not an unusual sight to see ten or
a dozen dead bodies daily floating down to the
sea; some of them headless, nearly all wanting a
limb, and in two instances lashed back to back.

In each of the numerous creeks are little
boats with arched roofs of matting or old sacks,
in which thousands of people are supposed to
live by fishing. In the loose sense of the phrase,
they do indeed fish for their living. How they get
it, I have not been able to discover. All the
way up both banks these dwellings are full of
men and women, birds, beasts, insects—arks with
old patriarchal Noahs in many of them, Chinamen
of some fabulous age. From the
grandfather or grandame of eighty, to the puling
infant tied round the middle to keep it from
tumbling out of the boat, they swarm. Cats are
there tied by the neck, cocks and hens tied by the
legs, the roof is tied to the sides, the sides are
tied to the bottom of the boat, and finally, the
boat itself is tied to the embankment. Little
China boys make their dirt-pies in the flower-pot
sort of stove at the head of the boat, regardless
of the swift current which laps its bow and
sides. In dry weather they are put ashore to
play, and hearty good use they make of their time.
They run up and down, tumble each other about,
and disport themselves like little Jack Tars
ashore after a six months' cruise. Opposite
the Chinese city are moored in regular lines,
large handsome junks each occupied by thirty
or forty people. The whole number of river
residents here is about eight thousand, while
two hundred thousand Chinese live in the
English settlement, and are subject to British law.
Shanghai contains a Roman Catholic cathedral,
a chapel, and two churches.

Ah! there is again a floating headless trunk.
Enormities in China take even the name of
justice. That I have seen. Five Chinese, for
example, broke into the house of a Mussulman
at Pekin, and robbed him of forty dollars. They
made their escape, but only as far as Tien-tsin,
where they were captured and tried, after the
Chinese mode of trial, which is conducted thus:
A mandarin of the first order is seated on a
raised bench or platform in a temple, and
surrounded by the officers of justice and a few
soldiers. The accused is brought in heavily
ironed, and when the accusers have stated the
charge against him the mandarin pronounces
sentence. If it be an adverse one, the accused
is led out for torture, until he confess his guilt.
He is stripped to the waist and flogged
unmercifully with rods, which have been steeped
in brine for the purpose, and when the poor
mangled wretch is released, his shoulder, back,
and breast are one mass of scarified flesh. Of the
five prisoners who were condemned to death
after confessing their guilt, I saw only one
executed: the sight was quite enough to satisfy my
curiosity. He was brought out of the jail strongly
shackled, and with a piece of bamboo sticking out
of the neck of his jacket behind, to the end of
which was affixed a written statement of his
crime. A body of braves preceded him, armed
with long sticks, having iron hooks fastened to
their ends, to clear the way for the procession. A
mandarin mounted on a mule, and clothed in a
blood-coloured dress, followed; then a crowd;
then another mandarin; sundry officials bearing
something very like a bundle of umbrellas; and
finally the Number One mandarin, a very bloated
self-sufficient looking person. As the procession
passed a certain house, the prisoner—who up to
this time had never uttered a word—broke out
into fearful imprecations against the inmates, and
could scarcely be silenced. The crowd halted
at the western suburbs of the town, and
disposed itself around a table placed in the middle
of the street for the use of the mighty Number
One, who took his seat at it with nonchalance,
and began arranging his writing materials for no
apparent purpose. The condemned knelt down
after having been divested of his jacket by a
couple of assistants, one of whom then seized
his tail and stretched his neck. In another
instant I saw the quivering sinews and muscles
of a headless trunk.

There is another way of punishment for lighter
offences. The prisoner's head is shaved, and a
peculiar kind of ointment is rubbed all over him,
from his crown to the soles of his feet. He is
then brutally flogged, and in the course of
four-and-twenty hours becomes a mass of ulcers.

A Chinese merchant of respectability
committed a crime, about twenty years back,
for which he was sentenced by a mandarin to
be chained to a post, hamstrung, and left to
starve to death. The people, however, fed
him secretly; and, in course of time, erected a
rude shed over him, composed of mud and
matting. Here he has resided ever since, and
derives a precarious subsistence by selling nuts
and cakes, and sometimes gambling with the
spectators. He is scantily clothed, and exposed
to the inclemency of every weather—a miserable
wreck of humanity.

As a contribution to the study of Chinese
ingenuity in the conception of cruelties, I have
had a description of the Temple of Horrors from a
friend who visited it recently. It is situated close
to the wall of Tien-tsin, and consists of a number
of single storied rooms built of mud and
roofed with tiles. At the entrance to the gate
stands, on either side, a pole sixty feet high,
fixed into a pyramid of mud, tastefully
ornamented with half-burnt bricks. Poles are
frequently seen in China at the entrance to large
edifices. On entering, my friend found himself
in the presence of a "grand guard," consisting
of ten braves, five on each side, all made of
straw and mud, and painted in most gorgeous
colours. The figures were as large as life, and
clothed in three different sorts of costume.
Some of them sported formidable-looking
moustachios of a peculiar material. Their horses
were also of life-size, and stood in spirited
attitudes. The first room examined, had in it about
seventy different images, of from two to four
feet high, standing, sitting, kneeling, or lying