orm the men's work, and the men wash the clothing. We pay our
physicians for attending us in illness; they pay their doctors to keep
them well, and stop their remuneration when they are ill. In short, this
people seem to be our antipodes in customs as well as being so
geographically.

A visit to the water-front of the city affords much amusement,
especially at the hour when the market boats with vegetables arrive from
the country, and from along shore with fish. Here the people swarm like
ants more than like human beings; all eager for business, all crowding
and talking at the same time, and creating a confusion that would seem
to defeat its own object; namely, to buy and to sell. The vegetables are
various and good, the variety of fruit limited and poor in flavor, but
the fish are abundant and various in size and color. Nine-tenths of the
business on the river-front is done by women, and they are very rarely
seen without an infant strapped to their backs, while they are carrying
heavy burdens in their hands, or are engaged in rowing or sculling their
boats. They trade, make change, and clean the fish quite oblivious of
the infant at their backs. A transient visitor to China is not competent
to speak of the higher class of women, as no access can be had to
domestic life. Only those of the common class appear indiscriminately in
public, Oriental exclusiveness wrapping itself about the sex here nearly
as rigidly as in Egypt. If ladies go abroad at all, it is in curtained
palanquins, borne upon men's shoulders, partially visible through a
transparent veil of gauze. Anywhere east of Italy woman is either a toy
or a slave.

Hong Kong is an island nearly forty miles in circumference, consisting
of a cluster of hills rising almost to the dignity of mountains. The
gray granite of which the island is mostly composed, furnishes an
excellent material for building purposes, and is largely employed for
that object, affording a good opportunity for architectural display. A
trip of a hundred miles up the Pearl River takes us to Canton, strangest
of strange cities. It has a population of a million and a half, and yet
there is not a street of over ten feet in width within the walls, horses
and wheeled vehicles being unknown. The city extends a distance of five
miles along the river, and a hundred thousand people live in boats. At
the corners of the streets, niches in the walls of the houses contain
idols, before which incense is consta