The morning wore away pleasantly as I was sitting on a little terrace, shaded by a large tree, in front of the ancestral hall. A number of small villages dotted the ricefields of the flat valley; and after their morning meal the people came out to their work, some carrying a light plough behind the ox which had to drag it, others with hoes to weed the sweet-potato fields, bands of laughing women going up the mountains to cut grass, and one gentleman taking a morning walk with a long spear over his shoulder. On returning from a visit to a curious rock, called the “Mother and Child,” from its resemblance to a woman with an infant upon her back, I found the school had “scaled,” to use a Scotch phrase; and the teachers, with the elders, were engaged in purchasing articles for a general dinner, and cutting them up. In the discussion which went on upon this subject a few of the pot-bellied children who remained took great interest, throwing in their opinions with much calmness and gravity. That afternoon I crossed over a second range of mountains into another valley, the path leading down near the side of a huge black precipice, which looked sublime in the moonlight. Not a soul was met on the latter part of the way, for when night descends on China, the country people confine themselves to their own homes, and only bands of robbers are to be met with, or men out for some bloody purpose, such as destroying a village with which they are at war. I had sometimes stopped, at the first village I came to, in the house of an old woman; and one evening, when taking an English friend there, a rather startling incident occurred. As we came round a corner upon the village, just as I was expatiating upon the friendliness of the people and the perfect safety we would enjoy, a gingall was fired, and the bullets came whistling round our heads. My companion looked as if he thought this fact considerably outweighed my theory; but it turned out that the gingall, which takes some little time to go off, had actually been fired before we came in sight round the corner. On this present occasion I went on to another village called Chin-wan, and slept in the house of a young teacher, who remained up, or rather lolling on his couch, till about one in the morning, smoking opium with a friend. It is a remarkable fact that, with only one exception, all the Chinese _dominies_ I came across were in the habit of smoking opium. Probably this was caused by the sedentary, harassing, and dreary nature of their occupation, which makes the soothing drug specially desirable. At one place I was told I could not see the teacher, though it was the middle of the day, because he was asleep from opium. Fancy being told, and as nothing out of the way, that a parochial schoolmaster was invisible, because he was dead drunk! The Chinese, however, usually take opium in moderation, after their meals, just as we do beer and wine, and no discredit attaches to such a use of it.