this down upon the cotton opposite his son.  There was thus laid a double strand, but the pole continued whipping hack and forth across the bed, father and son catching the threads and bringing them to place on the cotton at the rate of forty to fifty courses per minute, and in a very short time the entire surface of the mattress had been laid with double strands.  A heavy bamboo roller was next laid across the strands at the middle, passed carefully to one side, back again to the middle and then to the other edge.  Another layer of threads was then laid diagonally and this similarly pressed with the same roller; then another diagonally the other way and finally straight across in both directions.  A similar network of strands had been laid upon the table before spreading the cotton.  Next a flat bottomed, circular, shallow basket-like form two feet in diameter was used to gently compress the material from twelve to six inches in thickness.  The woven threads were now turned over the edge of the mattress on all sides and sewed down, after which, by means of two heavy solid wooden disks eighteen inches in diameter, father and son compressed the cotton until the thickness was reduced to three inches.  There remained the task of carefully folding and wrapping the finished piece in oiled paper and of suspending it from the ceiling.

On March 20th, when visiting the Boone Road and Nanking Road markets in Shanghai, we had our first surprise regarding the extent to which vegetables enter into the daily diet of the Chinese.  We had observed long processions of wheelbarrow men moving from the canals through the streets carrying large loads of the green tips of rape in bundles a foot long and five inches in diameter.  These had come from the country on boats each carrying tons of the succulent leaves and stems.  We had counted as many as fifty wheelbarrow men passing a given point on the street in quick succession, each carrying 300 to 500 pounds of the green rape and moving so rapidly that it was not easy to keep pace with them, as we learned in following one of the trains during twenty minutes to its destination.  During this time not a man in the train halted or slackened his pace.

This rape is very extensively grown in the fields, the tips of the stems cut when tender and eaten, after being boiled or steamed, after the manner of cabbage.  Very large quantities are also packed with salt in the proportion of about twenty pounds of salt to one hundred pounds of the rape.  This, Fig. 68, and many other vegetables are sold thus pickled and used as relishes with rice, which invariably is cooked and served without salt or other seasoning.

Another field crop very extensively grown for human food, and partly as a source of soil nitrogen, is closely allied to our alfalfa.  This is the Medicago astragalus, two beds of which are seen in Fig. 69.  Tender tips of the stems are gathered before the stage of blossoming is reached and served as food after boiling or steaming.  It is known among the foreigners as Chinese “clover.”  The stems are also cooked and then dried for use when the crop is out of season.  When picked very young, wealthy Chinese families pay an extra high price for the tender shoots, sometimes as much as 20 to 28 cents, our currency, per pound.