of the evening, arriving home at midnight to
find that my truant friend was ill in bed.

CHAPTER IV

RIDING

No country in the world is so badly supplied with horses as China,
both as regards quantity and quality.

The reasons for this are largely owing to the peculiar and wretched
condition of internal communications, and to the fact that horses are
seldom employed in cultivation of the soil, which is mostly performed
by manual labour, supplemented by water buffaloes in the central and
southern provinces and by oxen in the north.

Wherever rivers and lakes exist there is found a dense boating
population, whose occupation is the conduct of every kind of traffic.

On the large fluvial highways stately junks laden deep with cargo pass
backwards and forwards in unending procession. In shallower waters the
vessels are smaller but more numerous, and this adaptation to
circumstances goes on until the smallest streams and canals, which
invariably cover the valleys of China's mighty rivers as with a net,
are blocked with tiny craft, each bearing its load of merchandise or
its quota of passengers.

In such districts, where everything is carried by water and where
roads are few, there is little or no work for the horse, which, beyond
a few wretched specimens attached to the various yamens and military
camps, is seldom seen.

Where waterways do not exist, and traffic must necessarily be carried
overland, the highways are either narrow paths paved with large blocks
of stone and suitable only for wheelbarrows and pack-animals, or
tracks picked out at random over a width of perhaps a hundred yards,
along which lumbering, ill-constructed and springless carts plough
their ways, and strings of pack-animals wend slowly to and fro. The
numberless creaking wheel-barrows, bearing heavy loads, are propelled
by coolies, who, the yoke across the shoulders, stagger along between
the shafts, helped occasionally by a small sail set to catch a
favouring wind, or by another coolie harnessed to the vehicle by
ropes. The pack-animals mostly consist of camels (especially in the
north), mules and donkeys, ponies being used in more limited numbers.
As a rule, the carts are supplied with mixed teams of very poor class
animals, mules largely predominating, although ponies are also
numerous.

Europeans, accustomed to see carriages, dog-carts and all kinds of
horse-drawn conveyances circulating freely on macadamised roads, find
it diffi