er sails having
evidently been fashioned by a foreign hand.

Out of hundreds of junks moored in the Woosung river it was impossible
to find one without the great staring eye under what is called, by
courtesy, the bows, and not a few of them had the open mouth of a
dragon, with ugly teeth, painted under it, near the water-line, the
corners being drawn down, and the eye (from their desire that it should
see 'all ways at once') having a horrid squint. This gave to the boat a
lugubrious expression--if such a term may be allowed--ludicrous in the
extreme; and with fifty or a hundred junks drawn up in squadrons,
squinting and making faces at each other, nothing more thoroughly
Chinese could well be imagined.

Conspicuous among this fleet were the timber vessels, which were so
loaded as to be able to move only with the tide. The art with which
their lading was tied to the vessels, so as to preserve their shape
while stretching far over the water on either side, was admirable; and,
out of fifty timber junks, all seemed to be loaded in precisely the same
manner. This was accomplished by laying the ends of the poles, tied in
fagots, toward the bows, while their smooth, round butts were exposed to
the action of the tide. The sticks being of uniform length and
thickness, tapering evenly, and about twenty feet long, it was easy to
arrange their fagots so as to give them the swelling lines of a ship,
and enable the junk to breast the storms of the coast without damage to
her cargo.

Woosung, itself, is a place of no interest whatever--a filthy village,
with a market place on the river; the remains of old forts in its
neighborhood, and extensive rice and cotton fields about it, presenting
the only points worthy of note.

There is an old Joss house on the outskirts of the village, occupied by
the French as a barracks, or 'garrison of occupation for the protection
of the coast,' as a cadaverous old soldier told us, manned by twenty-six
soldiers, without earthworks or protection of any kind. They constitute
the 'foreign population' of Woosung, and might as well be drafted to
some more healthy locality for any good that they can do. Such as we saw
looked like men just recovering from cholera or yellow fever.

While lying at Woosung waiting for the tide to change, we were
frequently reminded that we could not be far from a great commercial
entrepot of the world, by seeing five or six large ships, of one
thousand tons each, rush past