and it was not without a pang of sincere regret at parting from them that I stepped on board the steamer.
I stopped at Kiukiang on the downward trip, and spent two or three days in the settlement. The native city, although it holds an important position near the mouth of the Po-yung lake, and thus communicates with the network of canals and streams that form the trade routes into the vast green-tea fields of Kiangsi and Ngan-Hwei, has nevertheless failed to attain a high commercial position; nor has the foreign settlement either, done much yet towards monopolising the traffic of the richly produc- tive districts by which it is surrounded. The city, which suffered a severe blow at the hands of the rebels who left it a ruined waste in 1861, had not, even at the time of my visit, regained its former prosperity.
Kiukiang will probably rise into much greater commercial importance when the Po-yung lake shall have been thrown open to steam navigation. One or two excursions which I made into the surrounding districts, enabled me to form a very favourable estimate of the fertility of the soil and the prosperity of the cultivators. The region, however, seemed thinly populated, and this fact alone is sufficient to account for the absence of the poverty and misery which fall to the lot of the toiling millions in many quarters of the land.
At a place called Tai-ping-kung, about ten miles inland from Kiukiang, I found the ruins of an ancient shrine, presenting most remarkable architectural features. All that remained of a once extensive edifice were two towers pierced with windows, which looked something like the pointed gothic apertures of a medieval European building. The walls of a small joss-house adjoining were built partly of finely sculptured stones; and the whole ruin, indeed, was unlike anything I had before seen in
