Forgetting time and the life of my own world, I sometimes come to inviolate stillnesses, where Nature opens her arms and bewitchingly promises embraces in soft, unending, undulating vastnesses, where even the watching of a bird building its nest or brooding over its young, or some little groundling at its gracious play, seems to hold one charmed beyond description.  It is, some may say, a nomadic life.  Yes, it is a nomadic life.  But how beautiful to those of us, and there are many, who love less the man-made comforts of our own small life than the entrancing wonders of the God-made world in spots where nothing has changed.  Gladly did I quit the dust and din of Western life, the artificialities of dress, and the unnumbered futile affectations of our own maybe not misnamed civilization, to go and breathe freely and peacefully in those far-off nooks of the silent mountain-tops where solitude was broken only by the lulling or the roaring of the winds of heaven.  Thank God there are these uninvaded corners.  The realm of silence is, after all, vaster than the realm of noise, and the fact brought a consolation, as one watched Nature effecting a sort of coquetry in masking her operations.

And as I look upon it all I wonder—­wonder whether with the “Opening of China” this must all change?

The Chinese—­I refer to the Chinese of interior provinces such as Szech-wan—­are realizing that they hold an obscure position.  I have heard educated Chinese remark that they look upon themselves as lost, like shipwrecked sailors, whom a night of tempest has cast on some lonely rock; and now they are having recourse to cries, volleys, all the signals imaginable, to let it be known that they are still there.  They have been on this lonely isolated rock as far as history can trace.  Now they are launching out towards progress, towards the making of things, towards the buying and selling of things—­launching out in trade and in commerce, in politics, in literature, in science, in all that has spelt advance in the West.  The modern spirit is spreading speedily into the domains of life everywhere—­in places swiftly, in places slowly, but spreading inevitably, si sit prudentia.

Nothing will tend, in this particular part of the country, to turn it upside down and inside out more than the cult of industrialism.  In a number of centers in Eastern China, such as Han-yang and Shanghai, foreign mills, iron works, and so on, furnish new employments, but in the interior the machine of the West to the uneducated Celestial seems to be the foe of his own tools; and when railways and steam craft appear—­steam has appeared, of course, on the Upper Yangtze, although it has not yet taken much of the junk trade, and Szech’wan has her railways now under construction (the sod was cut at Ichang in 1909)[G]—­and a single train and steamer does the work of hundreds of thousands of carters, coolies, and boatmen, it is wholly natural that their imperfect and short-sighted views should lead them to rise against a seeming new peril.