THE KING OF THE BEGGARS.
"Near the door of a house, in the edge of the city, we saw three beggars standing, while a man with his finger raised was talking to them. Doctor Bronson says the man who talked was their chief; and he was telling them what to do and where to go for the day. Begging is a regular business in China, and the beggars have their associations, like other trades.
"We met a long line of carts just after we got outside the city; each cart was drawn by a pair of bullocks, and they had ropes through their noses, just as we put them through the noses of bulls at home. The foremost pair was led by a boy, and all the other bullocks were fastened to the carts immediately in front of them. How they get on without pulling some of their noses out, when a cart in the middle of the line breaks down, we cannot imagine. Perhaps the cord gives way before the nose does.
"There were lots of half-wild dogs that seemed to belong to nobody; they barked at us, and some of them threatened to bite; but we showed tight, and they concluded to leave us. These brutes are known as 'pariah' dogs all through the East: 'pariah,' as applied to a man, means an outcast; and a pariah dog is a dog that has no master and no home. They are not so abundant here as at Constantinople or Damascus, but Doctor Bronson says there are quite enough of them to go around, and they go around all night and all day.
"Such a noise as the cart-wheels made you never heard in all your lives. Grease must be scarce in Cochin China, or the people must be fond of music; at all events, they do not try to stop the squeaking, and a native will go to sleep in one of these carts when it is moving along the road, just as calmly as he would in a Pullman car. Doctor Bronson says that these carts are loaded with gamboge and other dye-stuffs, and also with hides and horns of cattle, and perhaps with the tusks of elephants that have been killed for the sake of their ivory.
"About half-way along the road, we came to what the French call 'La Plaine des Tombeaux,' which is nothing more nor less than an enormous cemetery. It is said to cover several square miles of ground; whether it does so or not we cannot say, but certainly it is very large, and, as the Doctor remarked, very densely inhabited. There is nothing very remarkable about the tombs, as they are nothing but square enclosures, with little spires like those of the temples. In one part of the cemetery some priests were at work laying out a place for a grave; Doctor Bronson says that they perform a lot of ceremonies to determine where a grave shall be made, and are very particular to bring it under good influences, and shield it from bad ones. The same superstitions that prevail in China are to be found here; and even the most intelligent of the native or Chinese merchants in Saigon would not think of undertaking any important enterprise without first consulting the gods, and ascertaining that the 'Fung Shuey' was in their favor.
"It was an odd sight to see the telegraph-poles along the road, and skirting the edge of this ancient cemetery. It was bringing the past and the present close together, and from all we can see the present is having the best of it.
