Chinese yustice. and holding the bamboo perfectly horizontal, close to the flesh, he began to rain light blows on the man's buttocks. At first the performance looked like a farce, the blows were so light and the receiver of them so indifferent. But as the shower of taps con tinued with monotonous persistence, I be thought me of the old fiendish torture of driving a man mad by letting a drop of water fall every minute on his shaved head. After a few more minutes of the machine like rap-tap-tap, rap-tap-tap, a deep groan broke from the prisoner's lips. I walked over to look at him, and saw that his flesh was blue under the flogging. Then it became congested with blood, and, whereas at first he had lain quiet of his own accord, now a dozen men were holding him tight. The crowd gazed at him with broad grins on their faces, breaking out from time to time into a suppressed " Hi-yah " as he writhed in special pain or cried out in agony. And all this time the ceaseless shower of blows con tinued, the man who wielded the bamboo putting not a particle more force into the last stroke than into the first. At length the magistrate dropped another word, and the torture stopped as suddenly as it had begun, the prisoner was lifted to his feet and led across the court to lean against the wall. For obvious reasons he could not be " ac commodated with a chair." The next person to be called up was a po liceman. The magistrate put a question or two to him, and listened patiently for a while to his rambling and effusive replies. Then, as before, the fatal monosyllable dropped from his lips. With the greatest promptitude the policeman prepared himself, assumed the regulation attitude, and the flagellation began again. But I noticed that the blows sounded altogether different from before, much sharper and shriller, like wood falling upon wood rather than wood falling upon flesh. So I drew near to examine. Sure enough, there was a vital difference. The policeman had attached a small piece of wood to his leg by means of wax, and on this the blows fell,
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taking no more effect upon his person than if they had been delivered upon the sole of his boot. The fraud was perfectly transpar ent; everybody in the room, including the magistrate himself, must have known what was happening. Thus another peculiarity of Chinese justice is evidently that the punish ment of an ordinary offender is one thing, while that of an erring official is quite an other. I learned that the policeman was ordered to be bambooed for not bringing in a prisoner whom the magistrate had ordered him to produce. When the sham punishment was over he jumped briskly to his feet, ad justed his clothing, and resumed his duties about the court. While we had been watching the process of " eating bamboo," far different punishments were going on in another part of the court room, unnoticed by us. The bamboo is not so very far removed from still existent civil ized deterrent methods, but what was now before us recalled the most brutal ages. In one corner a man had been tied hand and foot on a small bench the length of his back in such a manner that his body was bent as far back as it could possibly be stretched in the form of a circle, his back resting on the flat seat of the bench, and his arms and legs fastened to the four legs. Then the whole affair, man and bench, had been tilted forward till it rested upon two feet and upon the man's two knees, almost falling over, — almost, but not quite. The position of the miserable wretch was as grotesque as it was exquisitely painful; his hands and feet were blue, his eyes protruded, his mouth gasped convulsively like a dying fish, and he had evidently been in that position so long that he was on the eve of losing conscious ness. And he was apparently forgotten. A few boys stood gazing at him open-mouthed, but nobody else paid any more attention to him than if he had been a piece of furniture. This was enough for my companions, and they left the room. But how is the Western World to know what the Celestial Empire really is, unless people are willing to see and
