s of Canton.

To get an idea of what the city is like, fancy an area of about thirty
square miles crowded with houses as thick as they can stand, every
house jam up against its neighbors, with only walls between--no room
for yards or parks or driveways--and these houses dense with people!
Then punch into these square miles of houses a thousand winding
alleys, no one wide enough to be called a street, and fill up these
alleys also with hurrying, perspiring, pig-tailed Chinamen. There are
no stores, shops or offices such as would look familiar to an
American, but countless thousands of Chinese shops wide open to the
streets, with practically no doors in evidence.

Such is Canton: a human hive of industry: a maze of labyrinthine
alleys crowded with people, the alleys or streets too narrow to get
the full light of day!

Outside this crowded city of Canton's living masses is the even larger
and more crowded city of Canton's dead. From the highest point on the
city wall my guide pointed out an unbroken cemetery extending for ten
miles: the hills dotted {144} with mounds until they have the
appearance of faces pitted by smallpox.

For the Chinaman, however unimportant in actual life, becomes a man of
importance as soon as he dies, and his grave must be carefully looked
after. The finest place I saw in Canton was the mortuary where the
dead bodies of wealthy Chinamen are kept until burial. The handsome
coffins I saw ranged in value from $1400 to $2700 Mexican, or half
these amounts American money. The lacquered surfacing accounts for the
high cost.

Nor are these departed Celestials kept here for a few days only.
Sometimes it is a matter of several years, my guide told me, the
geomancers or fortune-tellers being employed all this time in finding
a suitable site for a grave. These miserable scoundrels pretend that
the soul of the dead man will not rest unless he is buried in just the
right spot and in just the right kind of soil. Perhaps no professional
man in China earns as much as these fakirs. Sometimes it happens that
after a man has been dead two or three years his family suffers a
series of misfortunes. A frequent explanation in such cases is that
the wrong site has been chosen for the dead man's burial place.
Another geomancer is then hired and told to find a new grave where the
soul will rest in peace. Of course, he charges a heavy fee.

In one $1400 coffin I saw was the body of a wealthy young Chinaman who
died