Meals were served to each passenger wherever he might be.  Dinner consisted of hot steamed rice brought in very heavy porcelain bowls set inside a covered, wet, steaming hot wooden case.  With the rice were tiny dishes, butterchip size, of green clover, nicely cooked and seasoned; of cooked bean curd served with shredded bamboo sprouts; of tiny pork strips with bean curd; of small bits of liver with bamboo sprouts; of greens, and hot water for tea.  If the appetite is good one may have a second helping of rice and as much hot water for tea as desired.  There was no table linen, no napkins and everything but the tea had to be negotiated with chop sticks, or, these failing, with the fingers.  When the meal was finished the table was cleared and water, hot if desired, was brought for your hand basin, which with tea, teacup and bedding, constitute part of the traveler’s outfit.  At frequent intervals, up to ten P. M., a crier walked about the deck with hot water for those who might desire an extra cup of tea, and again in the early morning.

At this season of the year Chinese incubators were being run to their full capacity and it was our good fortune to visit one of these, escorted by Rev. R. A. Haden, who also acted as interpreter.  The art of incubation is very old and very extensively practiced in China.  An interior view of one of these establishments is shown in Fig. 96, where the family were hatching the eggs of hens, ducks and geese, purchasing the eggs and selling the young as hatched.  As in the case of so many trades in China, this family was the last generation of a long line whose lives had been spent in the same work.  We entered through their store, opening on the street of the narrow village seen in Fig. 10.  In the store the eggs were purchased and the chicks were sold, this work being in charge of the women of the family.  It was in the extreme rear of the home that thirty incubators were installed, all doing duty and each having a capacity of 1,200 hens’ eggs.  Four of these may be seen in the illustration and one of the baskets which, when two-thirds filled with eggs, is set inside of each incubator.

Each incubator consists of a large earthenware jar having a door cut in one side through which live charcoal may be introduced and the fire partly smothered under a layer of ashes, this serving as the source of heat.  The jar is thoroughly insulated, cased in basketwork and provided with a cover, as seen in the illustration.  Inside the outer jar rests a second of nearly the same size, as one teacup may in another.  Into this is lowered the large basket with its 600 hens’ eggs, 400 ducks’ eggs or 175 geese’ eggs, as the case may be.  Thirty of these incubators were arranged in two parallel rows of fifteen each.  Immediately above each row, and utilizing the warmth of the air rising from them, was a continuous line of finishing hatchers and brooders in the form of woven shallow trays with sides warmly padded with cotton and with the tops covered with sets of quilts of different thickness.