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14
Friday, 10 July

    This afternoon, after a day of rain, we set out for a little hike, to see what we could see. We turned to the north along the lake, and I was interested in finding the end of the city wall. The wall had formerly inclosed the city but in recent years the section adjoining the lake had been removed and the city had gone down to the water. The broken end should have been not far from the lake and we went to see. Near the spot where it was marked on one of our maps we found remnants of it, ruined mounds from which all of the facing stone had been removed. Behind a large building belonging to the Tao Te Hsueh She we came to the end of the old rampart itself. It was overgrown with weeds, and in the wet it was not too easy of ascent. Workmen were busy at the end cutting it down and filling a low place inside of it. On an open field nearby soldiers indulged in drill and rather childish artillery maneuvers. Along the outside of the wall was a narrow cultivated strip between the wall and the lake. The facing of the wall, formerly of heavy stone blocks, is completely gone from this section for the space of a mile or more. It seems not to have been either so high or so wide as the walls of Paoting and Peking. We strolled along the narrow footpath on the top, alternately watching the canal, an old moat, and the houses and men and fields and Needle Pagoda on the one side, and the little paddies and houses on the other. We passed several small boys and their buffalo, the latter grazing along the unfrequented top of the wall. Following the wall and its attendant canal we came to a corner where the wall once stood foursquare around a court between two gates. The wall is there, and the gate openings but the old doors and guard house have gone from the inner gate and are but remnants at the outer. We stopped to speculate, to admire and ancient [[psai-lo ?]] and to watch the people; then we turned back and retraced our steps along the way we had come. The wall appeared to be no better beyond the gate then it had been where we had walked, though along the railroad side, the other side of the city, we had noticed it in good repair, apparently, as we  came in. Some of these old walls might well be kept as monuments, but it costs money to keep them, and where is that to come from?