and grand.

My own little apartment occupied the middle of the boat, screened off
with mats and curtains from the ends occupied by the boat people and my
men, and though it was necessarily a thoroughfare, my privacy was always
respected and no one attempted to enter without permission. By an
ingenious arrangement of the mat roof I could lie at ease on my camp-bed
and watch the shores slip past, but toward evening when the sun was
setting, I often sat out on the extreme prow of the boat where I could
enjoy the full sweep of the view up and down. Liu, the cook, had
provided himself with a little cement cooking arrangement on which he
prepared me very savoury messes. He and the Yunnan coolie and the
interpreter and the boat people all chummed together very amicably, and
I was impressed again, as so many times before, by the essential
democracy of China. The interpreter was several pegs above the others,
socially, but he showed no objection at going in with them, and more
than once, when the inns were crowded, took up his quarters with the
coolies, but--he always got well waited upon. Nor was the captain's wife
kept in seclusion (it would have been hard, indeed, to get it in a
thirty-foot wu-pan), but all day long I could hear her chatting with the
men in cheerful give-and-take fashion.

By the way, the name which Europeans give to the river down which I was
floating, the Min, is quite unknown to the Chinese, and it may have
originated with the Jesuits, the first men from the West to make their
home in Szechuan. By the natives the river is sometimes called the "Fu"
because of the three "fu" towns on its banks, Chengtu, Chia-ting, and
Suifu, and sometimes they speak of it as the Ta-kiang, regarding it as
the upper waters of the Yangtse.

Below Chia-ting the river, by whatever name called, flows through a
smiling, open country, with gently varied scenery. The soft slopes on
either hand were richly cultivated with maize and rape, and nameless
little villages, picturesque with black timbered houses and red temples,
peeped out of groves of banyan and bamboo and orange. Then the hills
closed in on the river and the current ran like a millrace. Often a
promontory was crowned with one of the many-storied white "chuman"
pagodas of Szechuan, while in the face of a cliff I could now and then
discern openings which I knew were the famous, mysterious cave-dwellings
of a bygone time and an unknown people found all about Chia-ting. I