kept just flooded by a
constant stream of running water. When ripe the crop stands about two
and a half feet in height, and the water having been cut off some
time previously, reaping commences with the sickle.

Into the harvest-field is often brought a large wooden tub about four
feet in diameter by three feet high, and the reaper, having cut an
armful of rice, takes it by the straw end and threshes the ears five
or six times with great force over the side, so that the grain falls
into the tub, which, when thus filled, is replaced by an empty one and
taken to the threshing-floor, where the contents are thrown up by
shovels-full into the air, the breeze blowing the chaff to one side
and the winnowed rice falling in a heap by itself. When the crop is
not thus threshed in the harvest-field it is stacked at the farm, and
sometimes in the low forks of large trees to remove it from the danger
of possible floods, subsequently to be trodden out by oxen on the
threshing-floor or beaten out by the farmer and his family with light
basket-work flails on bamboo shafts.

In villages and small towns where many houses adjoin, it is a common
practice to paint or dye young chickens as soon as they are hatched,
so that each housewife may know her own. One woman will colour hers a
bright red, another will use blue, another green, and so on, the
appearance of these strikingly-coloured little creatures intermingled
in the streets being exceedingly droll and novel to Europeans.

Amongst all classes of Chinese, from beggars to Academicians, belief
in ghosts, dreams and the supernatural generally is absolute and
unshakable.

If you express doubt or scepticism they will readily agree with you
from a certain nervousness of being thought ridiculous, as well as
from a feeling of the futility of any attempt to persuade Europeans of
the soundness of such convictions.

In the autumn of 1899, when at Shasi, which is an unthriving town nine
hundred miles up the Yangtse, and where another Englishman and I were
the then only Europeans residing amongst a dense, hostile population,
which only a few weeks previously had burnt down all foreign houses
and forced the inmates to flee for their lives in small boats, two of
the most remarkable cases of this universal superstition came directly
under my notice.

At that time one of those rebellions which are a chronic feature of
Chinese Society was in full bloom in the neighbouring province of
Szechwan, w