live in this house, and never have I seen
such a thing."

"Pardon me, but will you do me the favour to look at this basin?"

"Sir, you are right, you are completely right; it is the weather; _every
bed in Cadiz is now full of them_."

In the morning, and every morning, we were away at daylight, and walked
some miles before breakfast. All the way to Suifu the road is a paved
causeway, 3 feet 6 inches to 6 feet wide, laid down with dressed flags
of stone; and here, at least, it cannot be alleged, as the Chinese
proverb would have it, that their roads are "good for ten years and bad
for ten hundred." There are, of course, no fences; the main road picks
its way through the cultivated fields; no traveller ever thinks of
trespassing from the roadway, nor did I ever see any question of
trespass between neighbours. In this law-abiding country the peasantry
conspicuously follow the Confucian maxim taught in China four hundred
years before Christ, "Do not unto others what you would not have others
do unto you." Every rood of ground is under tillage.

Hills are everywhere terraced like the seats of an amphitheatre, each
terrace being irrigated from the one below it by a small stream of
water, drawn up an inclined plain by a continuous chain bucket, worked
with a windlass by either hand or foot. The poppy is everywhere abundant
and well tended; there are fields of winter wheat, and pink-flowered
beans, and beautiful patches of golden rape-seed. Dotted over the
landscape are pretty Szechuen farmhouses in groves of trees. Splendid
banyan trees give grateful shelter to the traveller. Of this country it
could be written as a Chinese traveller wrote of England, "their fertile
hills, adorned with the richest luxuriance, resemble in the outline of
their summits the arched eyebrows of a fair woman."

The country is well populated, and a continuous stream of people is
moving along the road. Grand memorial arches span the roadway, many of
them notable efforts of monumental skill, with columns and architraves
carved with elephants and deer, and flowers and peacocks, and the
Imperial seven-tailed dragon of China. Chinese art is seen at its best
in this rich province.

[Illustration: CULTIVATION IN TERRACES. In the foreground the poppy in
bloom.]

[Illustration: SCENE IN SZECHUEN.]

I lived, of course, in the common Chinese inn, ate Chinese food, and was
everywhere treated with courtesy and good nature; but at first I found
it trying