The rain grew more and more persistent, and the roads were muddy and slippery to the last degree. Even the sure-footed Chinese kept tumbling down, and it was almost less trying to walk than to be bumped down in our chairs. As we advanced into the province the culture of the opium poppy (papaver somniferum) increased till it was as much as ninety-nine per cent. of the crops, and the appearance of the inhabitants showed only too plainly its disastrous effects. In some of the villages the children were naked, although it was still cold weather, being only the beginning of April. In the markets the goods were of the meanest and cheapest description, and the people looked abject. They rushed out to beg from us. The main industry of the district was evidently the making of coal balls. The coal lies actually on the surface, and has only to be scraped together, mixed with a little earth and water, and then dried: it burns quite well. Some of the coal is used for fertilizing the ground, being reduced to ash by being burnt in pits with stones piled on it. Lime also is used for the poppy fields. Sometimes the coal holes by the wayside are a couple of yards in diameter. The coir palm is to be seen in every village, and loquats and walnut trees are cultivated for their fruit. We struggled along through a thick mist one day, and one after another went down like ninepins on the slippery path. One of my bearers cut his ankle, and was thankful for the doctor’s attentions. Suddenly I heard an ominous roaring sound, and looked in vain for the cause. It proved to be produced by a big stream, which disappeared into a hole in the earth; this appears to be quite a common phenomenon, and later on we saw one bubble out of the ground in the same strange fashion. Another shape of hill attracted my attention, and as I tried to reproduce it accurately on paper it became obvious that this was one of the Chinese mountain forms with which one has been familiar from childhood in their pictures, and which one had supposed to be a work of imagination. As they always hold in their canons of art that “form” is quite subsidiary to “spirit,” I imagined that it was not inability to imitate form accurately, but a deliberate intention of ignoring it in order to express some more important truth that was the cause of their drawing, what seemed to me, such unnatural mountains. But here one discovered that these forms _are_ natural in China, and it is after all only our ignorance that makes us so misjudge them. There were hedges by the roadside all bursting into leaf and blossom, and I never saw such a wealth of ferns of many kinds. There was material for a whole volume on ferns alone. Lofty trees of catalpa bungei with their purple blossom, and Boehmeria nivea grew by the roadside, and rhea grass in the village gardens.