Page:China- Its State and Prospects.djvu/486

454 it home, deposits it on the dung-hills at the entrance of every village, where the manure is heaped up and ripened for use. The productions of the soil are beans, in great quantities; millet, of various kinds; buck-wheat, of a poor quality; rice and wheat. The fields are not fenced off by hedges, but divided by small grassy ridges, sufficient to enable each man to know his own; and the houses are collected together in villages, either for defence or company. The cattle to be met with are, a small kind of oxen, horses of a diminutive size, asses in abundance, and some mules. Shaggy-haired goats were seen, but no sheep; though the mandarins managed to supply us with some at Ke-san-so. The domestic animals are never left to graze at pleasure, but tethered to a string, are removed from one place to another, when the grass is consumed. No venomous, or wild beasts of any kind, were seen, neither did we hear of any; but birds were espied in great numbers, some of which being very tame, allowed us to come near them without flying away.

The poor people who pursue, from youth to old age, the same monotonous round of toils, for a subsistence, never see nor hear anything of the world around them. Improvements in the useful arts and sciences, and an increase of the conveniences of life, are not known among them. In the place where their fathers lived and died, they toil and pass away, to be succeeded by another generation in the same manner. The towns, and even the villages, which are noted in the old maps, we found as delineated; unchanged, except by decay, and unimproved in any respect. The people possess few of the comforts of life; neither table, chair, nor any article of furniture, was to be seen in the houses of