Page:Through China with a camera.pdf/264

 always a trying experience to the temper of a European, except where the men have been bound by contract to perform their work for a fixed price and within a given period of time. If this precaution has been neglected the notion takes possession of the boatmen that foreigners are by nature wealthy, and that as a duty to themselves — who are always, both by birth and by necessity, extremely poor — they must take the most of the rare opportunity which good fortune has cast in their way. Inspired by such considerations as these, the men set themselves to enjoy a good deal more than their usual scanty leisure, a good deal more food, a longer spell of the opium-pipe and deeper drains out of the sam-shu flask. Hence in one's diary such jottings as the following by no means infrequently recur: " The men have been amusing themselves all day long, running the boat on to sandbanks and eating rice." *' Tracking-line entangled again with that of another boat ; two crews quarrelling for half an hour, another half-hour spent in apologies, and a third in disentangling the lines. "

Sunday we spent quietly at a place called Teuk-kai, or Bamboo Crags. Here I had a walk ashore with my boy Ahong, and stopped for awhile to rest on a green mossy bank, whence our boat could dimly be made out through a sheet of mist that rose above the river, like the steam from a cauldron's mouth. We next passed over a lovely bit of country, through olive and orange plantations, where the trees bent down beneath their fruit, and the air seemed laden with perpetual fragrance. In one orchard we fell in with a watchman ensconced in a snug little straw hut, containing a bamboo table, a tea-pot, two chairs and a fine cat and kittens. The old man had been watching the place, he said, for more than half a century; he showed us the way to the farm, conducting us through fields of sugar-cane to