not the Mahavansa record that at the founding of Ruanwéli Dâgaba in the second century B.C. there was present, under a holy Abbot, some enormous number of monks (no doubt to be safely divided by ten) from 'Alasanda in the Yona country,' which can hardly stand for anything else but Alexandria as the capital of the Græco-Egyptian kingdom, Yona (Ionia) being the general oriental term for Greek. And, as when the early ascetics of the younger faith developed in Egypt along the lines of the older, they found the name and notion of the Lavra pre-existing and ready to their hands, just so, when a small colony of monks, remarkable for purity and learning, departed from Gumbum into a lone valley of the Alps, they founded yet another Lavra, which is now Labrang, a seat of wealth and high prosperity and many Living Buddhas.

But, though Labrang has now in size and splendour outstripped its mother-Abbey, Gumbum still retains the higher prestige and sanctity. There is the famous Golden Roof, and there the caul and the birthplace of Tsong Kavá the Saint; and there, above all, the sacred tree on whose leaves are holy characters imprinted by nature, though often visible only to the eye of faith. This eye is usually lacking in modern travellers and missionaries, but seems to have been unexpectedly present in the fathers Huc and Gabet, who surely ought never to have been guilty of such an aberration. The tree is Ligustrina amurensis, an arborescent lilac in habit, with the silvery flaking bark of a cherry, and the flower-trusses of a colossal privet; the miraculous character, in point of fact, is a variegation in the shape of the Greek, which seems occasionally to appear on either side the midrib of the oval foliage. In any case, charactered or no, never a leaf is plucked from the tree, and those that fall are distributed with jealous care to the faithful, as with the foliage of the sacred Ficus at Anuradhapura. Gumbum, lying less remote from the secular arm than Labrang, is of a temperament much friendlier to foreigners, and has Living Buddhas of special breadth and eagerness of mind. But Gumbum lacks an Abbot, for, when the Supreme Pontiff was on his famous flight from Lhasa to Urga, he passed from abbey to abbey up the Border, and, skirting Jô-ni, made a settlement

of some time in Gumbum. But when His Holiness moved on, it was found that he was strangely niggard of vails and benefactions; he had been an expensive guest; and, when no sense of the fact was shown, the presiding pontiffs felt a grievance. Meanwhile the Dalai Lama was now gradually on his return journey from Urga to Lhasa, and, nearing Gumbum, he sent ahead the announcement that he meant to honour the Abbey with a second visit. This was too much; polite messages came back from the Abbot and his coadjutors, to the effect that they infinitely regretted not having now the means to entertain His Holiness adequately in their poor foundation. And so the Dalai Lama had to stay in Sining instead. But first he stretched forth his hands, and laid an ill-wish upon that Abbot of Gumbum; and the Abbot of Gumbum withered up and died accordingly within the year.

I hope he will never take a similar step against Abbot Squint-eyes, a very much smaller and quite inconsiderable prelate of the Border, for Abbot Squint-eyes is a plain and portly old scoundrel, with an engaging guttapercha smile, who presides over a tiny crumbling temple outside a poor Tibetan village on a slope of the Alp. Steeply up behind it rises the inviolable forest, with here and there a sacred ring of spruces towering above its verdure. Below it the ground falls away in cultivated fields to a grey little brawling beck; and on the other side, in wall over wall of darkness, a-flicker with the golden tapers of larch in autumn, and all a haze of rose and violet and purple in the spring, the virgin forest rises higher and higher till at last it gives place to a titanic embattlement of dolomitic crags and castles, shutting out the day. The little place is very poor; were it not for his jug of hot fermented liquor, and the two ladies who do not even pretend not to be his concubines, Abbot Squinteyes would have but a barren life. No one comes to church, often not he himself; all the monks there ever were have long since abandoned the tiny collapsing cloister. One or two, indeed, still linger in a new comfortable cottage at the top of the main street; but there is as a rule but little vitality in the place, unless it be when there is a quickening of Church Life' enjoined by pastoral letters from Gumbum, and assisted by a

reinforcement of fresh monks. For then Abbot Squinteyes has a goodly store of food and drink carried up to one of the abandoned rooms in the cloister, and thither removes his ample bulk, more voluminous yet in flowing murrey-coloured petticoats, to be readier at hand for the three or four daily services that continually proceed, though occasionally they have to be postponed till the Abbot's potations have a little lost their effect and left him less liable to stumble over the litanies and responses of the liturgy, interspersed as they are at intervals by sudden braying choruses of drums, bells, conches, cymbals and trumpets.

Or else it is the annual blessing of the fields that gives the Abbot work to do. Forth to some shoulder of the slope, now all dead and bare in the approach of winter, proceeds the whole male population of the place (while the women stay congregated behind on a wall) to where certain mysterious haycocks and symbolic scarecrows are dressed. Crackers explode in volleys, and guns go off disorderly in dropping salvoes. And now forth proceeds the Abbot at the head of his few monks; he is swathed in a cope of golden silk, and on his head is a huge mitre resembling a cocked hat worn very far back upon his nape, and heavily crested with dingy mustard-coloured fringe. Ill-dispelling whisk in hand, he advances to the haycocks, and there solemnly pontificates in the inevitable deep sonorous intonation of the priest all the world over; psalms are sung, responses chaunted, vibrating upwards in the pale and deathly calm of the wintry air. And then the compilations are consumed with fire, and the whole population, monks and laity, return joyously together to the monastery, there to prolong the hours till far into the twilight, with wine and merriment and gossip, for they are all a jolly cordial crew in that poor little starveling place, simple and kindly and honest, true Tibetan, though their land is actually the territory of China. Not but that they can be fierce on occasion. An old lady' of the place once went to sleep imprudently on her hot-bed; it smouldered, took alight, and the whole hamlet of wooden chalets was burned out. When one thinks of the desperate struggle that its inhabitants have to get a bare living anyhow, squeezed as they are between Tepo raiders on

the west and Chagolese enemies on the east, with China behind them always avid of tribute, they are hardly to be blamed for laying hold of that disastrous old lady and putting her to death.

But it must not be thought that monks and abbeys and villages are always so wild. These things happened on the uncontrolled borders of Kansu and Tibet: further north, above Lanchow, there is a big peninsular boss of mountainous country which accordingly has been left to itself, an offshoot of wild Tibet, but jutting far out into Kansu, and shut in on all sides by Chinese rule. Here, under the shadow of the Capital, there is nothing but peace and goodwill in the monasteries, and the stranger is made welcome as a friend. Especially delightful are the Halls of Heaven. Here a big village of whitewashed, low monastic houses huddles cosily into a bay of warmth beneath an engirdling amphitheatre of torrid precipices, along whose crests the shy Big-horn sheep of the mountain freely harbour and browze, magnificent animals as large as donkeys, perfectly secure of their lives, even within call of the passing pilgrims, so stringently is the Holy Law observed in the abbey domains. The place is large and populous and popular, a centre of devotion for all the country round. Stately churches rise here and there from garden-courts of peony and lilac, daily presented fresh upon the altars of the Buddhas. There are some four hundred monks attached to the place, and daily services are three or more in number in the big main edifice, from the roof of which, at the appointed time, a monk in a crested helmet summons to worship with long wistful wailings on a conch. Soon the crowd gathers in the stone-paved square in front, with all the jolly little acolytes, each in a mitre almost as large as himself, with which it is a great game to cuff your neighbour, or pluck off his and throw it down the steps for a general scrimmage. But now the main doors open, and the congregation pours into the darkness of the church, which exhales an icy breath of incense and old wax. In long transverse rows they kneel, while a busy monk goes hurrying up and down the aisles aspersing each as he goes with holy water from a dragon-mouthed ewer; and after him comes the tall and magnificent figure of the Prior, in pleated cloak

of scarlet, and a gigantic fringeless mitre of yellow, so exactly like a great crested Roman helmet that he looks as if he were rehearsing for a centurion in Julius Cæsar' at His Majesty's, as back and forth he solemnly proceeds, censing each worshipper from a long fat candle of incense. Meanwhile the service proceeds, with chaunt and psalm, till at a given interval other monks come hurrying in, with big beautiful buckets full of tea, hot from the smokeblackened abbey-kitchen just outside, with which they run up and down the rows of kneeling figures, filling the wooden bowls that every monk has ready there in his place. And so the service continues; the earliest is at dawn, and the latest about dusk.

In front of the abbey stretches a wide plain of finest turf, level as a racecourse, all a rippled sea in May with a soft lavender-and-white Iris, whose intoxicating fragrance floats sweet as hyacinth in the sunny air. Beyond this, again, is a park of filmy poplars overshadowing a level stretch of soundless soft sand; it fringes the stony tracts of the river, and on its further side rises up a mountain-range of forest, pine, and spruce, the only woodland of the region, the property of the abbey, and sedulously preserved. It is pleasant, indeed, in the later afternoon, to sit upon the sward in a knot of friendly questioning monks, and watch the procession of devotees making the round of the whole place, and performing the stations of devotion, turning the Invocation wheels, and saluting each Chorten of pious relic and memory. Often these pilgrims are women, in hopes of a baby, having bound a volume of the Scriptures on their backs, and now advancing heavily in their best clothes, of purple and crimson, with broad Byzantine stoles of leather back and front, beset with round white plaques of porcelain, and diversified with a score of jingling silver chains across the breast. And sometimes they make a yet more arduous pilgrimage, in a series of prostrations, falling flat upon their face with outstretched arms, and making the next prostration from the point to which their finger-tips had reached before, unless there should chance to be nobody looking, in which case they may perhaps jump forward a yard or so. It reminds one of the Santa Scala.

It must never be forgotten that there is nothing of