rger boats have to be watched
carefully to prevent grounding; sometimes, when the river is wide and the
passable channel but a narrow place in the middle, the tow-people have to
take to the water, often wading waist deep. Men and women are dressed
pretty much alike, but in addition to the broad-legged pantaloons and
blue blouse, the women are distinguished by a checked apron. Some of them
wear broad bamboo hats, while others wear nothing but nature's covering,
or perchance a handkerchief tied around their heads. The traffic on the
river is something enormous, scores of boats dotting the river at every
turn. It is no longer difficult to believe the oft-heard assertion, that
the tonnage of China's inland fleet is equal to the ocean tonnage of all
the world.

Below me on the right the scene is scarcely less animated; one would
think the whole population of the country were engaged in pumping water
over the rice-fields, by the number of tread-wheels on the go. One of the
most curious sights in China is to see people working these irrigating
machines all over the fields. Instead of the buffaloes of Egypt and
India, everything here is accomplished by the labor of man. The
tread-wheel is usually worked by two men or women, who steady themselves
by holding to a cross-bar, while their weight revolves the tread-wheel
and works a chain of water-pockets. The pockets dip water from a hole or
ditch and empty it into troughs, whence it spreads over the field. The
screeching of these wheels can be heard for miles, and the grotesque
Chinese figures stepping up, up, up in pairs, yet never ascending, the
women singing in shrill, falsetto voices, and the incessant gabble of
conversation, makes a picture of industry the like of which is to be seen
in no other part of the world.

Chin-yuen, my next halting-place, forma something of a crescent on the
west shore of the river, and is distinguished by a seven-storied pagoda
at the southern extremity of its curvature. As seen from the east bank,
the city and its background of reddish hills, two peaks of which rise to
the respectable height of, I should judge, two thousand feet, is not
without certain pretensions to beauty. Many of the houses on the river
front are built over the water on piles, and broad flights of stone steps
lead down to the water.

The usual boat population occupy a swarm of sampans anchored before the
city, while hundreds of others are moving hither and thither. The water