One day Mr. W---- having asked a worker in camphor-wood if he could have some articles which he was making for us completed at a certain time, he was answered with--“No can, my old muder hab makee die; my must go bury he.” Thinking that the woman had just died, and admiring the man’s filial affection, our sympathies were at once excited. On making further inquiries, however, we learned that the man’s mother had been dead two or three years, but that he did not wish to tell a foreigner that the season had come when he must visit the graves of his fathers, and perform the customary ancestral adorations. The first part of April is the season for performing this idolatrous service. It is called _pai shan_, or worshipping at the hills, and is the time when all the people--men, women, and children--visit their family graves; where, after renewing, or putting them in neat order, they present sacrifices of food, offer libations, and burn incense. After going through various idolatrous ceremonies and prayers, pieces of red and white paper are placed at the back part of the graves or tombs, where they are made secure by placing small fragments of turf upon them. These bits of paper remain a long time as evidence that the customary annual rites have been performed. In our daily walks upon the island, directly after this season, we observed that scarcely a grave had been neglected. The worship of Manes is the chief idolatry of the nation; and besides their yearly adorations at the hills, nearly every house has an “ancestral hall,” which is a room where wooden tablets, sacred to the dead,--called _shin chu_, i. e., “house of the spirit,”--are set up and worshipped. These tablets are about twelve inches in length by three in width, and have the name, rank, date of birth, and death, carved in the wood. While at Fuh-chau, the wife of a missionary of the American Board presented me with a tablet which had formerly belonged to, and been worshipped by, an old gentleman who is now a member of the Fuh-chau Mission Church. It was, however, lost when I fell into the hands of the pirates, but fortunately the note accompanying it was among the few papers which I saved; and in order to illustrate more fully the nature of this kind of worship, I quote from it what my friend wrote in regard to the history of the tablet:--