were temporary, miserable-looking settlements, conveying the idea of a thinly peopled country; and the inhabitants wore the poverty-stricken look only too common in other parts of China. We have walked over the country, and along the banks, for nearly half a day without encountering a single individual. At many places the river had undermined the banks, and these were falling in great blocks eight or ten feet wide; and there was one point where we noticed that the stream was cutting out the heart of an old settlement, for there were foundations of houses exposed, and many coffins protruding from the bank.
On the 27th we reached Shang~chai-wan, and remarked that the banks in front of an old pagoda there, had been carefully faced up with stones. Thus a useful sort of landmark was well protected from the inroads of the stream, while the houses were left to be swept away as the bank fell in.
This village indicated some slight degree of prosperity and presented a pretty winter's scene. There was no one astir, not a footprint stained the white mantle in which the soil was wrapt ; only on one level patch the leaves of a winter crop shot up in rows, and formed a pale green pattern on a snowy ground. A little further on was the town of Shang-chai-wan, where our boys went ashore and spent half a day in a vain search for coal. Then the crew had to be hunted up all over the place, and one by one the men dropped in, each with as much sam-shu as he could hold inside him, or else stupified with opium. Capt. Wang we found in a filthy alley, enjoying the nectar of a grog- shop, amid a group of natives who were civil enough. Few of them had ever set eyes upon a genuine white man before, and all made numerous good-natured enquiries about our relations and our clothes; one old man even suggested that our faces and hands had only acquired a pale colour through the use of
