We had travelled all day from Wuhu towaid Anking hugging one bank or the other of the Yangtze, sometimes taking a narrower channel that ran behind a long island, always watching the life in the villages as we passed—the men and women carrying water from the stream in new wooden buckets, the small boys driving water buffaloes down and clambering on their backs to use them as diving platforms, the trackers who toiled along the tow-path sometimes hidden completely from view behind tall banks of reeds. I wondered what China could do with such an immense crop of reeds as she seems to have, but I soon learned that they have many purposes. They give the mud_ which forms village huts consistency. They thatch the roofs of those same huts. They give heat and fire by which to cook. They feed the buffalo, too, and are used in innumerable small ways of usefulness about the village.
Japan's Eye ror Ore.
About three o'clock we arrived at Tikiang. All along the banks huge piles of iron ore were dumped. A Japanese cargo boat was anchored there and there was much business on board as the cargo came on to be stowed away and as repairs were made around the ship's sides, Tikiang is a deserted-looking town for all the business offshore. All of the shacks and godowns are on the verge of the river and about to be pushed in by the high hill which crowds itself so close behind. But the shacks are in a sad state of dilapidation and Jock as though a good wind would sweep them away. They seem to be saved from that calamity by the protecting presence of the very hill which threatens them. There is a_ hotel: reputed to be a fairly good one thrusting itself up from vho centre of this huddled town and on its upstairs verandah pots of geranlums are bravely displayed in defiance of the utter desolation of the scene. It is like a pioneer town abandoned by everything but hope.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.