Opposed To All Progress

enterprise in China, particularly in so far as reg-ards railroad building, has had, and is still having, a good deal to contend vvith in the way of native prejudice, cupidity and superstition, says Cassell's Magazine, and the tales are many that have been told of the peculiar difficulties encountered in that country by European engineers and engineering syndicates in the course of their operations. When, for example, the first railroad was built, a number of years ago, the necessary land, it was stated, was bought from several hundred different proprietors, all of whom wanted additional bounties for the disturbances of ancestral graves, which, as may be known, abound in what the "foreign devil" would be apt to consider rather unusual localities. One proprietor claimed to have buried on his strip of land no less than five mothers-in-law, for whom he had to be paid. Satisfying him naturally regulted in a marvelous multiplication of dead mothers-in-law, who thus soon became the chief item in the cost of the land. Another curious example of the difficulties of railroad construction in the celestial empire has more recently been mentioned, and has been afforded by the conduct of the Tartar general of MouWden, the capital of Manchuria, in connection with the surveying vrork of the railroad from Kirin, another large Manchurian town, to Isewchwang, the seaport of the provmee. Accordmg1 to current report it was proposed to make a junction oí this line for Monkelen at a place a short distance outside the city, but the general got a number of geomancers to investígate the effect of this selectiou upon Moukden. These sagres reported that the vertebriB of the dragon which encircles the holy city of Moukden would be broken by drivinpf the long1 spikes of the railroad ties into them, and according'ly the general vetoed the decisión of the engineers and directed them to earry the railroad in a straight line from Kirin to Newchwaag, without approaching1 Moukden at all. This, while a shorter route, would compel the crossing of a low and marshy tract of land, liable to floous and only sparsely populated.