e-groves; the lines of
tea-shrubs, well hoed, and showing the bare earth beneath; the
pollard mulberries; the plots of cotton and maize and wheat and yam
and clover; the little brown and green tiled cottages with
spreading recurbed eaves, the clumps of feathery bamboo, or of
sugar-canes;

The endless silver threads of irrigation canals and ditches,
skirting the hills for scores and hundreds of miles, tier above
tier, and serpentining down to the lower slopes and plains--

The accumulated result, these, of centuries upon centuries of
ingenious industry, and innumerable public and private
benefactions, continued from age to age;

The grand canal of the Delta plain extending, a thronged waterway,
for seven hundred miles, with sails of junks and bankside villages
innumerable;

The chain-pumps, worked by buffaloes or men, for throwing the water
up slopes and hillsides, from tier to tier, from channel to
channel;

The endless rills and cascades flowing down again into pockets and
hollows of verdure, and on fields of steep and plain;

The bits of rock and wildwood left here and there, with the angles
of Buddhist or Jain temples projecting from among the trees;

The azalea and rhododendron bushes, and the wild deer and pheasants
unharmed;

The sounds of music and the gong--the Sin-fa sung at eventide--and
the air of contentment and peace pervading;

A garden you might call the land, for its wealth of crops and
flowers,

A town almost for its population.

A population denser, on a large scale, than anywhere else on
earth--

Five or six acre holdings, elbowing each other, with lesser and
larger, continuously over immense tracts, and running to plentiful
market centers;

A country of few roads, but of innumerable footpaths and waterways.

Here, rooted in the land, and rooted in the family, each family
clinging to its portion of ancestral earth, each offshoot of the
family desiring nothing so much as to secure its own patrimonial
field,

Each member of the family answerable primarily to the family
assembly for his misdeeds or defalcations,

All bound together in the common worship of ancestors, and in
reverence for the past and its sanctioned beliefs and accumulated
prejudices and superstitions;