on, I strike off in a northwesterly course. The Chinaman grins and
chuckles humorously at my departure, as though his risibilities were
probed to their deepest depths at my perverseness in going contrary to
his directions. As plainly as though spoken in the purest English, his
chuckling laughter echoes the thought: "You'll catch it, Mr. Fankwae,
before you have gone very far in that direction; you'll wish you had
listened to me and gone back to 'Quang-tung.'"

The country is a marvellous field-garden of rice, vegetables, and
sugar-cane for some miles. The villages, with their peculiar,
characteristic Chinese architecture and groves of dark bamboo, are
striking and pretty. The paths seem to wind about regardless of any
special direction; the chief object of the road-makers would appear to
have been to utilize every little strip of inferior soil for the public
thoroughfare wherever it might be found. A scrupulous respect for
individual rights and the economy of the soil has resulted in adding many
a weary mile of pathway between one town and another. To avoid destroying
the productive capacity of a dozen square yards of alluvial soil,
hundreds of people are daily obliged to follow horseshoe bends around the
edges of graveyards that after two hundred paces bring them almost to
within jumping distance of their first divergence.

Occasionally the path winds its serpentine course between two tall
patches of sugar-cane, forming an alleyway between the dark-green walls
barely wide enough for two people to pass. Natives met in these confined
passages, as isolated from the eyes of the world as though between two
walls of brick, invariably recoil a moment with fright at the unexpected
apparition of a Fankwae; then partially recovering themselves, they
nimbly occupy as little space as possible on one side, and eye me with
suspicion and apprehension as I pass.

Great quantities of sugar-cane are chewed in China, both by children and
grown people, and these patches grown in the rich Choo-kiang Valley for
the Fat-shan, Canton, and Hong-kong markets are worth the price of a
day's journeying to see. So marvellously neat and thrifty are they, that
one would almost believe every separate stalk had been the object of
special care and supervision from day to day since its birth; every
cane-garden is fenced with neat bamboo pickets, to prevent depredation at
the hands of the thousands of sweet-toothed kleptomaniacs who file past
and eye th