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vision of Gilbert running toward her, then came oblivion.

She came to consciousness out of a nightmare of remorse-the steamer carrying Arthur away, the small figure with outstretched hands pleading with her, the water widening between them, Arthur defying her with his childish malice, and she looking into his eyes and hating himhating one moment, the next in an agony of terror seeing him struggling in the water, sinking, sinking, while she stood upon the shore, mute, dumb, powerless to save, to atone-she, Mildred, the silent, willing cause of his death, and a whole long lifetime of torment, of remorse, stretching out before her.

She heard Gilbert's voice, her name.

She opened her eyes to see him bending over her.

"Arthur?" she said faintly.

"He is safe," Gilbert answered.

Her eyes closed again, but the tears gathered thickly under the lids. She heard Gilbert's voice again, "My dearest, I 'd no idea you cared so much."

She nodded, wordless. It was true. She did care. Somehow the miracle had happened. There was a bond now binding her to Gilbert's child-the bond of that vision of temptation, the shock of her discovery of her own smothered hatred. She could love him now that she had saved him. She could wait and work against his childish antagonism, now that her own was dead forever.

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N China to-day one may observe a state the West since the Middle Ages, and which will probably never recur on this planet. For many generations the Chinese, loath to abandon to the careless plow of the stranger the graves that dot the ancestral fields, and reluctant to exile themselves from the lighted circle of civilization into the twilight of barbarism, have stayed at home, multiplying until reproduction and destruction have struck a balance, and society has entered upon the stationary stage. To Americans, who have had the good fortune to develop their life and standards in the cheerful presence of unlimited free land, the life and standards of a people that for centuries have been crowding upon the subsistence possibilities of their environment cannot but seem strange and eccentric.

The most arresting feature of Chinese life is the ruthless way in which the available natural resources have been made to minister to man's lower needs. It is true that childish superstitions have held back the Chinese from freely exploiting their mineral treasures. It is also true that from five to ten per cent., in some cases even twenty per cent., of the farms is given up to the grave-mounds of ancestors. But, aside from these reservations, the earth is utilized as perhaps it never has been elsewhere. Little land lies waste in highways. Throughout the rice zone the roads are from foot-paths one to three feet wide, yet the greedy farmers nibble away at the roads on both sides until the undermined paving-stones sink dismally into the

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in growing food for animals. Even on the boulder-strewn steeps there is no grazing save for goats, for where a cow can crop herbage, a man can grow a hill of corn. The cows and the water-buffaloes never taste grass except when they are taken out on a tether by an old granny and allowed to browse by the roadside and the ditches, or along the terraces of the rice-fields.

The traveler who, in dismay at stories. of the dirt and vermin of native inns, plans to camp in the cleanly open is incredulous when he is told that there is no room to pitch a tent. Yet such is the case in two thirds of China. He will find no roadside, no commons, no waste land, no pasture, no groves or orchards, not even a dooryard or a cow-pen. Save the threshing-floor, every outdoor spot fit to spread a blanket on is growing something. But, if he will pay, he may pitch his tent on a submerged rice-field, in the midst of a bean-patch, or among the hills of sweet potatoes.

In one sense it is true that China is cultivated "like a garden," for every lump is broken up, every weed is destroyed, and every plant is tended like a baby. So far, however, as the word "garden" calls up visions of beauty and delight, it does not apply. In county after county you will not see altogether a rood of land reserved for recreation or pleasure-no village green, no lawns, no flower-beds or ornamental shrubbery, no parks, and very few shade-trees. To be sure, there are men of

fortune in inner China, but they are relatively very few. I doubt, indeed, if one family in two thousand boasts a garden with its fern-crowned rockery and its lotos. pond overhung by drooping willows and feathery bamboos. One One is struck, too, with the rarity of grape-arbors, vineyards, orchards, and orange-groves. In the country markets one sees mountains of vegetables, but only a few paltry baskets of flavorless fruit. The demand for luxuries that appeal to the palate is too slight, the call for sustaining food is too imperious, to withdraw much land from its main business, which is to grow rice and beans and wheat and garlic to keep the people alive.

To win new plots for tillage, human sweat has been poured out like water. Clear to the top the foot-hills have been carved into terraced fields. On a single slope I counted forty-seven such fields running up like the steps of a Brobdingnagian staircase. And the river-bed below, between the thin streams that wander over it until the autumn rains cover it with a turbid flood, has been smoothed and diked into hundreds of gemlike paddy-fields green with the young rice. In the mountains, where the mantle of brown soil covering the rocks is too thin to be sculptured into level fields, the patches of wheat and corn follow the natural slope, and the hoe must be used instead of the plow. Two such plots have I seen at a measured angle of forty-five degrees, and any number tilted at least forty degrees from the horizontal. Of course the wash from these deforested and tilled mountain flanks is appalling. A thousand feet below, the Heilung, the Han, or the Kia ling, slate-hued or tawny when it should be emerald, prophesies of the time when all this exposed soil will be useless bars in the river, and the mountain will lie stripped of the humus slowly formed through geologic time. Indeed, one hears with a shudder of districts where the thing has run its course to the bitter end. Mountains, dry, gray skeletons; the rich valley bottoms buried under silt and gravel; population dwindled to one family in four square miles!

Nowhere can the student of man's struggle with his environment find a more wonderful spectacle than meets the eye from a certain seven-thousand-foot pass

amid the great tangle of mountains in west China that give birth to the Han, the Wei, and the rivers that make famed Szechuen the "Four-river province." Save where steepness or rock-outcropping forbids, the slopes are cultivated from the valley of the Tung-ho right up to the summits, five thousand feet above. In this vertical mile there are different crops for different altitudes-vegetables below, then corn, lastly wheat. Sometimes the very apex of the mountain wears a greenpeaked cap of rye. The aërial farms are crumpled into the giant folds of the mountains, and their borders follow with a poetic grace the outthrust or incurve of the slopes. In this colossal amphitheater one beholds a thousand fields, but only two houses. Here and there, however, one detects in a distant yellow bank a row of dark, arched openings like gopher-holes. It is a rural village, for most of these highlanders carve their habitations out of the dry, tenacious loess.

The heart-breaking labor of redeeming and tilling these upper slopes that require a climb of some thousands of feet from one's cave home is a sure sign of population pressure. It calls up a picture of a swelling human lake, somehow without egress from the valley, rising and rising until it fairly lifts cultivation over the summits of the mountains. In June these circling tiers of undulating sky-farms are an impressive, even a beautiful sight; yet one cannot help thinking of the grim, ever-present menace of hunger that alone could have forced people to such prodigies of toil.

Rice will thrive only under a thin sheet of water. A rice-field, therefore, must be level and inclosed by a low dike. Where the climate is friendly, the amount of labor that will be spent in digging a slope into rice-fields and carrying a stream through them is beyond belief. In one case I noticed how a deep-notched, rocky ravine in the flank of a rugged mountain had been completely transformed. The peasants had brought down countless basketfuls of soil from certain pockets at the foot of the cliffs. With this they had filled the bottom of the V, floated it into a series of levels, banked them, set them out with rice, and led the water over them. So that now, instead of a barren gulch, there is a staircase of curving fields, perhaps four

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I. FOREST OF MASTS, KINGKIANG

IV. CHINESE CASH THE EQUIVALENT OF $3.15. WEIGHT, FIFTY POUNDS

III. WATERFRONT HOMES AT CHUNGKING

Which may be swept away by the summer rise of the Yang-tse.

V. A SLOW FREIGHT ON THE GREAT NORTHERN ROAD Each carrier travels from eight to fifteen miles a day. VI. RIVER HOUSE

BOATS, CAN

rods wide, and differing in level by the height of a man. I have also seen the sides of a gully in which a child could not stand undiscovered cut into shelves for making a string of rice-plots no larger than a table-cloth, irrigated by a trickle no bigger than a baby's finger. One of these plots, duly banked and set out with nineteen rice-plants at the regulation eight inches, could be covered by a dinner napkin!

Were it not for an agriculture of incredible painstaking, the fertility of the soil would have been spent ages ago. In a low-lying region like Kiang-su, for example, the farmer digs an oblong settling basin, into which every part of his farm drains. In the spring, from its bottom he scoops for fertilizer the rich muck washed from his fields. It is true the overflow from his pond carries away some precious elements, but these he recovers by dredging the private canal that connects him with the main artery of the district. In the loess belt of north China the farmer simply digs a pit in the midst of his field and scatters the yellow earth from it as a manure. A Chinese city has no sewers nor does it greatly need them. Long before sunrise, tank-boats from the farms have crept through the city by a network of canals, and by the time the foreigner has finished his morning coffee, a legion of scavengers have collected for the encouragement of the crops that which we cast into our sewers. After a rain, countrymen with buckets prowl about the streets scooping black mud out of hollows and gutters or dipping liquid filth from the wayside sinks. A highway traversed A highway traversed by two hundred carts a day is as free from filth as a garden path, for the neighboring farmers patrol it with basket and rake.

No natural resource is too trifling to be turned to account by the teeming population. The sea is raked and strained for edible plunder. Seaweed and kelp have a place in the larder. Great quantities of shell-fish, no bigger than one's fingernail, are opened and made to yield a food that finds its way far inland. The fungus that springs up in the grass after a rain is eaten. Fried sweet potato-vines furnish the poor man's table. The roadside ditches are bailed out for the sake of fishes no longer than one's finger.

Great panniers of strawberries, half of them still green, are collected in the mountain ravines and offered in the markets. No weed or stalk escapes the bamboo rake of the autumnal fuel-gatherer. The grass tufts on the rough slopes are dug up by the roots. The sickle reaps the grain close to the ground, for straw and chaff are needed to burn under the rice-kettle. The leaves of the trees are a crop to be carefully gathered. One never sees a rotting stump or a mossy log. Bundles of brush, carried miles on the human back, heat the brick-kiln and the potter's furnace. After the last trees have been taken, the far and forbidding heights are scaled by lads with ax and mattock to cut down or dig up the seedlings that, if left alone, would reclothe the devastated ridges. We asked a Szechuenese if he did not admire a certain craggy peak with gnarled pines clinging to it. "No," he replied; "how can it be beautiful when it is so steep that we cannot get at the trees to cut them down?"

The cuisine of China is one of the great toothsome cuisines of the world; but for the common people the stomach and not the palate decides what shall be food. The silkworms are eaten after the cocoon has been unwound from them. After their work is done, horses, donkeys, mules, and camels become butcher's meat. The cow or pig that has died a natural death is not disdained. A missionary who had always let his cook dispose of a dead calf noticed that his calves always died. Finally he saturated the carcass of the calf with carbolic acid and made the cook bury it. Thereafter his calves lived. In Canton dressed rats and cats are exposed for sale. Our boatmen cleaned and ate the head, feet, and entrails of the fowls used by our cook. Scenting a possible opening for a tannery, the governor of Hong-Kong once set on foot an inquiry as to what became of the skins of the innumerable pigs slaughtered in the colony. He learned that they were all made up as "marine delicacy" and sold among the Chinese. Another time he was on the point of ordering the extermination of the mangy curs that infest the villages in the Kowloon district because they harassed the Sikh policemen in the performance of their duties. He found just in time that such an act would "interfere with the

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