Page:Ling-Nam; or, Interior views of southern China, including explorations in the hitherto untraversed island of Hainan (IA cu31924023225307).pdf/210

 206 Ling-Nau.

path, the delightful cooluess being all the more grateful after the heat of the treeless plain outside. The stones and the trunks of the trees are moss-grown. From the moist earth beside the paths spring beautiful flowers of a kind unseen before. The trees are full of birds, and ou the upper ‘slopes are many springs of living water, that supply an unceasing stream for the little brook that flows away through the plain.

Ferns grow luxuriantly, and the sweet olives, here in their native soil, attain a height and proportion not seen in the south of the province. They are noble trees forty and fifty feet high, with a larger and more vigorous foliage, and a richer profusion of flowers, exhaling a sweeter and more abiding fragranee. So abundant are they, that in the season the poor grass-cutters on the hills) women and boys, are provided with large bunches of them, tied on their bundles of grass, or bound around their heads.

No more charming retreat. have I seen in which to escape for a short time the heat and worry of Canton, than this sylvan glen with its manifold attractions. In the open space in the midst of the woods is a collection of temples, neither striking in architecture nor well preserved. A few priests reside here, Buddhism and Taoism flourishing side by side. In the lower part of this enclosure is the remarkable spring from which the place is named, enclosed by a stone railing about five feet square. The water rises out of a rock on which the Chinese character Happiness is traced. It comes up in a stream about as thick us a man’s wrist through an orifice in the upper left-hand corner, flows through