[Illustration: CHINESE STREET SCENE DURING RAINY SEASON.]
Such hints as these will be sufficient to suggest to the least imaginative that peculiar unattractiveness of the Peking streets which has been a determining factor in the habits of the foreign residents. Life would be intolerable to Western folks if it were not removed from the sights, noises, and odours of the streets; and fortunately the ruling local principle of spaciousness lends itself to the solution without running counter to any native practice or prejudice. The Legations, the customs, and the missionaries are in their various degrees established in "compounds" large enough to accommodate the members of their staffs in separate buildings with ample elbow-room, as in an Indian cantonment, interspaced with trees and sometimes gardens, the whole surrounded by a high wall and capable of defence. These seductive oases in a wilderness of garbage, in a city of great distances, naturally conduce to stay-at-home habits and to segregation, which it requires some energy to overcome.
Nor is Peking life wanting in more mundane compensations. The city itself contains many "objects of interest," which in the earlier years of foreign intercourse were open to the curious. The well-known "Lama temple," reputed to contain 2000 inmates, which has for many years been dangerous to enter, was in those days a much-frequented resort, where the stranger was welcome to go over the establishment and listen to the Buddhist litanies: a certain bass voice, or perhaps a succession of bass voices, in the choir, indeed, attained celebrity among foreigners. In the refectory of that monastery one was obliged, out of respect, to eat, or feign to eat, the unmitigated fat of the sheep's tail, fished from out the broth, not with a hook, as was the custom in the Jewish Church, but by the deft fingers of the chief lama. Now, on the contrary, the foreigner who enters the gate is hustled, robbed, and stoned. This great change in the attitude of the lamas has never been satisfactorily explained, but it is presumed that the manners and customs of some of the visitors to the temple may have had something to do with it. There have been visitors who, with the keen acquisitiveness of the world-tourist, have slipped small "josses" into their pockets out of what, perhaps, appeared to them the superfluous number of molten images ranged round the shelves of the great Buddha's sanctuary.