attraction. Here the poet Camoens found a retreat, and here too, Chinnery produced a multitude of sketches and paintings, which have really had some influence on art in the south of China.
Swatow is the next place on our route northward, and to reach it we take steamer from Hongkong. There is, I must tell you, almost daily a service of steamers up and down the Chinese coast. The splendid passenger accommodation and the facilities for conveying merchandise, suppUed by these vessels, are of a kind not easily surpassed; and considering the nature of the coasts they navigate and the dangerous typhoons to which they are exposed, very few accidents occur.
Swatow is the port of the city Chao-chow-fu, which lies in the province of Kwang-tung. Chao-chow-fu ought really to have been an entrepot for foreign trade, but this idea was given up in consequence of the turbulence of the surrounding clans. The town is built upon the banks of the Han, and the district through which that river flows is one of the most fertile in the province. Swatow has a harbour available even for vessels of the largest tonnage; and so far as that point goes the place is better suited to foreign trade than Chao-chow-fu would have been ; for the latter place stands some thirty miles up the river, and can only be reached by lighters of a shallow draught. The foreign settlement, or rather the residences of foreigners, are perched upon a low range of hills, which remind one of the barren cinder-looking hills of Aden. Huge boulders of granite are planted up and down these hilly slopes in the most extra- ordinary positions ; some are like Druidical circles, others re- semble great obelisks. Not unfrequently, too, they bear in- scriptions in Chinese characters, which are nothing more than the productions of natives, who have sought to gain an unprofitable
