er flowing smoothly and reflecting
deeply the lofty and rugged hills which fall steeply to the water's
edge, a light boat, and a model crew, it was a pleasure to lie at ease
wrapped in my Chinese pukai and watch the many junks lazily falling down
the river, the largest of them "dwarfed by the colossal dimensions of
the surrounding scenery to the size of sampans," and the fishing boats,
noiseless but for the gentle creaking of the sheers and dip-net,
silently working in the still waters under the bank.

At Ping-shan-pa there is an outstation of the Imperial Maritime Customs
in charge of a seafaring man who was once a cockatoo farmer in South
Australia, and drove the first team of bullocks to the Mount Brown
diggings. He lives comfortably in a house-boat moored to the bank. He is
one of the few Englishmen in China married in the English way, as
distinct from the Chinese, to a Chinese girl. His wife is one of the
prettiest girls that ever came out of Nanking, and talks English
delightfully with a musical voice that is pleasant to listen to. I
confess that I am one of those who agree with the missionary writer in
regarding "the smile of a Chinese woman as inexpressibly charming." I
have seen girls in China who would be considered beautiful in any
capital in Europe. The attractiveness of the Japanese lady has been the
theme of many writers, but, speaking as an impartial observer who has
been both in Japan and China, I have never been able to come to any
other decision than that in every feature the Chinese woman is superior
to her Japanese sister. She is head and shoulders above the Japanese;
she is more intellectual, or, rather, she is more capable of
intellectual development; she is incomparably more chaste and modest.
She is prettier, sweeter, and more trustworthy than the misshapen
cackling little dot with black teeth that we are asked to admire as a
Japanese beauty. The traveller in China is early impressed by the
contrast between the almost entire freedom from apparent immorality of
the Chinese cities, especially of Western China, and the flaunting
indecency of the _Yoshiwaras_ of Japan, with "their teeming, seething,
busy mass of women, whose virtue is industry and whose industry is
vice."

The small feet of the Chinese women, though admired by the Chinese and
poetically referred to by them as "three-inch gold lilies," are in our
eyes a very unpleasant deformity--but still, even with this deformity,
the walk of the