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103

persons of Mears and Louise. We got to looking at pictures and spent a couple pleasant hours.

Ching Ch'en has a little cold. We have learned several interesting things from him recently, and one of them concerned this cold. It seems that he does not have a disease or illness, but that a cold wind happened to blow up his nostrils and fill his head. Consequently his head feels stuffed and uncomfortable. Evidently the thing to do is to blow the cold wind out again. We gave him some cascara and some quinine and it seemed to care for the wind. Earlier in the season there was a rumor that several cases of cholera had been discovered in Peking, a very unusual thing. We urged special precautions in the kitchen, especially in the washing of fruit and vegetables; but our boy told us that it was  a common disease caused by people sleeping with insufficient covering in the cool nights of early fall; if we wanted to avoid it let us by all means put more covers on our bed. Lest he might be mistaken in his report we questioned his knowledge of cholera and his description of all the details was too graphic to allow us believe that he had mistaken the subject of the conversation. Cholera is said to be bad in Shanghai and the Yangste valley this fall, but Peking is out of bounds for it, and if there was any there seems to be no more fear of it. 

Thursday, 8 October.

The feature of the day was a typical Peking dust storm, one of the kind that made any sort of business out of doors unpleasant, and even frequent dusting indoors useless. I rode to school on my wheel, and got there and back all right. Dorothy however, went out in a ricksha to do some errands, including getting a dress from the tailor and going to the post office to get a new wedding present. On the way from tailor's to post office she put down her head and closed her eyes in a particularly bad blow, and the ricksha puller ducked his head and paid little attention to the surrounding world, pulling straight ahead in a very moral way, looking neither to the right nor to the left. When they arrived at the post office the  dress which had been wrapped in paper and desposited at Dorothy's feet was not to be found. With injunctions to the boy to hurry Dorothy had him turn around, and they tore back