The country is a marvellous field-garden of rice, vegetables, and sugar-cane for some miles.  The villages, with their peculiar, characteristic Chinese architecture and groves of dark bamboo, are striking and pretty.  The paths seem to wind about regardless of any special direction; the chief object of the road-makers would appear to have been to utilize every little strip of inferior soil for the public thoroughfare wherever it might be found.  A scrupulous respect for individual rights and the economy of the soil has resulted in adding many a weary mile of pathway between one town and another.  To avoid destroying the productive capacity of a dozen square yards of alluvial soil, hundreds of people are daily obliged to follow horseshoe bends around the edges of graveyards that after two hundred paces bring them almost to within jumping distance of their first divergence.

Occasionally the path winds its serpentine course between two tall patches of sugar-cane, forming an alleyway between the dark-green walls barely wide enough for two people to pass.  Natives met in these confined passages, as isolated from the eyes of the world as though between two walls of brick, invariably recoil a moment with fright at the unexpected apparition of a Fankwae; then partially recovering themselves, they nimbly occupy as little space as possible on one side, and eye me with suspicion and apprehension as I pass.

Great quantities of sugar-cane are chewed in China, both by children and grown people, and these patches grown in the rich Choo-kiang Valley for the Fat-shan, Canton, and Hong-kong markets are worth the price of a day’s journeying to see.  So marvellously neat and thrifty are they, that one would almost believe every separate stalk had been the object of special care and supervision from day to day since its birth; every cane-garden is fenced with neat bamboo pickets, to prevent depredation at the hands of the thousands of sweet-toothed kleptomaniacs who file past and eye the toothsome stalks wistfully every day.

After a few miles the hitherto dead level of the valley is broken by low hills of reddish clay, and here the stone paths merge into well-beaten trails that on reasonably level soil afford excellent wheeling.  The hillsides are crowded with graves, which, instead of the sugar-loaf “ant hillocks” of the paddy-fields, assume the traditional horseshoe shape of the Chinese ancestral grave.  On the barren, gravelly hills, unfit for cultivation, the thrifty and economical Celestial inters the remains of his departed friends.  Although in making this choice he is supposed to be chiefly interested in securing repose for his ancestors’ souls, he at the same time secures the double advantage of a well-drained cemetery, and the preservation of his cultivable lands intact.  Everything, indeed, would seem to be made subservient to this latter end; every foot of productive soil seems to be held as of paramount importance in the teeming delta of the Choo-kiang.