-fu, paved with flagstones varying in width from three to six or
seven feet--the only main road, of course--is creditably regular in some
places, whilst other portions, especially over the mountains, are
extremely bad and uneven. In some places, I could hardly get along at
all, and my boy would call out as he came along in his chair behind me--

"Master, I thinkee you makee catch two piecee men makee carry. This
b'long no proper road. P'raps you makee bad feet come."

And truly my feet were shamefully blistered.

One had to step from stone to stone with considerable agility. In places
bridges had fallen in, nobody had attempted to put them into a decent
state of repair--though this is never done in China--and one of the
features of every day was the wonderful fashion in which the mountain
ponies picked their way over the broken route; they are as sure-footed
as goats.

As I gazed admiringly along the miles and miles of ripening wheat and
golden rape, pink-flowering beans, interspersed everywhere with the
inevitable poppy, swaying gently as in a sea of all the dainty colors of
the rainbow, I did not wonder that Szech'wan had been called the Garden
of China. Greater or denser cultivation I had never seen. The
amphitheater-like hills smiled joyously in the first gentle touches of
spring and enriching green, each terrace being irrigated from the one
below by a small stream of water regulated in the most primitive manner
(the windlass driven by man power), and not a square inch lost. Even the
mud banks dividing these fertile areas are made to yield on the sides
cabbages and lettuces and on the tops wheat and poppy. There are no
fences. You see before you a forest of mountains, made a dark leaden
color by thick mists, from out of which gradually come the never-ending
pictures of green and purple and brown and yellow and gold, which roll
hither and thither under a cloudy sky in indescribable confusion. The
chain may commence in the south or the north in two or three soft,
slow-rising undulations, which trend away from you and form a vapory
background to the landscape. From these (I see such a picture even as I
write, seated on the stone steps in the middle of a mountain path), at
once united and peculiarly distinct, rise five masses with rugged
crests, rough, and cut into shady hollows on the sides, a faint pale
aureola from the sun on the mists rising over the summits and sharp
outlines. Looking to the north, an immense cu