the wadding, quilting, belting and tying, incorporate and confine as part of the effective material a large volume of air, thus securing without cost, much additional warmth without increasing the weight of the garments.  Beneath these outer garments several under pieces of different weights are worn which greatly conserve the warmth during the coldest weather and make possible a wide range of adjustment to suit varying changes in temperature.  It is doubtful if there could he devised a wardrobe suited to the conditions of these people at a smaller first cost and maintenance expense.  Rev. E. A. Evans, of the China Inland Mission, for many years residing at Sunking in Szechwan, estimated that a farmer’s wardrobe, once it was procured, could be maintained with an annual expenditure of $2.25 of our currency, this sum procuring the materials for both repairs and renewals.

The intense individual economy, extending to the smallest matters, so universally practiced by these people, has sustained the massive strength of the Mongolian nations through their long history and this trait is seen in their handling of the fuel problem, as it is in all other lines.  In the home of Mrs. Wu, owner and manager of a 25-acre rice farm in Chekiang province, there was a masonry kang seven by seven feet, about twenty-eight inches high, which could be warmed in winter by building a fire within.  The top was fitted for mats to serve as couch by day and as a place upon which to spread the bed at night.  In the Shantung province we visited the home of a prosperous farmer and here found two kangs in separate sleeping apartments, both warmed by the waste heat from the kitchen whose chimney flue passed horizontally under the kangs before rising through the roof.  These kangs were wide enough to spread the beds upon, about thirty inches high, and had been constructed from brick twelve inches square and four inches thick, made from the clay subsoil taken from the fields and worked into a plastic mass, mixed with chaff and short straw, dried in the sun and then laid in a mortar of the same material.  These massive kangs are thus capable of absorbing large amounts of the waste heat from the kitchen during the day and of imparting congenial warmth to the couches by day and to the beds and sleeping apartments during the night.  In some Manchurian inns large compound kangs are so arranged that the guests sleep heads together in double rows, separated only by low dividing rails, securing the greatest economy of fuel, providing the guests with places where they may sit upon the moderately warmed fireplace, and spread their beds when they retire.

The economy of the chimney beds does not end with the warmth conserved.  The earth and straw brick, through the processes of fermentation and through shrinkage, become open and porous after three or four years of service, so that the draft is defective, giving annoyance from smoke, which requires their renewal.  But the heat, the fermentation and the absorption of products of combustion have together transformed the comparatively infertile subsoil into what they regard as a valuable fertilizer and these discarded brick are used in the preparation of compost fertilizers for the fields.  On account of this value of the discarded brick the large amount of labor involved in removing and rebuilding the kangs is not regarded altogether as labor lost.