Page:Farmers of forty centuries.djvu/104

86 banks or loaded upon boats and barges for the market. The brush-wood was largely made from the boughs of pine, tied into bundles and stacked like grain. The stove wood was usually round, peeled and made from the limbs and trunks of trees two to five inches in diameter. All this fuel was coming to the river from the back country, sent down along steep slides which in the distance resemble paths leading over hills but too steep for travel. The fuel was loaded upon large barges, the boughs in the form of stacks to shed rain but with a tunnel leading into the house of the boat about which they were stacked, while the wood was similarly corded about the dwelling, as seen in Fig. 44. The wood was going to Canton and other delta cities while the pine boughs were taken to the lime and cement kilns, many

Fig. 44.—Scantily wooded hills on the Sikiang. Boatload of stove wood; stack of pine bough fuel in bundles behind. The trees are small pine from which the lower limbs have been cut for fuel.