Several species of these snails are collected in quantities and used as food. Piles containing bushels of the empty shells were seen along the canals outside the villages. The snails are cooked in the shell and often sold by measure to be eaten from the hand, as we buy roasted peanuts or popcorn. When a purchase is made the vender clips the spiral point from each shell with a pair of small shears. This admits air and permits the snail to be readily removed by suction when the lips are applied to the shell. In the canals there are also large numbers of fresh water eel, shrimp and crabs as well as fish, all of which are collected and used for human food. It is common, when walking through the canal country, to come upon groups of gleaners busy in the bottoms of the shallow agricultural canals, gathering anything which may serve as food, even including small bulbs or the fleshy roots of edible aquatic plants. To facilitate the collection of such food materials sections of the canal are often drained in the manner already described, so that gleaning may be done by hand, wading in the mud. Families living in houseboats make a business of fishing for shrimp. They trail behind the houseboat one or two other boats carrying hundreds of shrimp traps cleverly constructed in such manner that when they are trailed along the bottom and disturb the shrimps they dart into the holes in the trap, mistaking them for safe hiding places. On the streets, especially during festival days, one may see young people and others in social intercourse, busying their fingers and their teeth eating cooked snails or often watermelon seeds, which are extensively sold and thus eaten. This custom we saw first in the streets of a city south of Kashing on the line of the new railway between Hangchow and Shanghai. The first passenger train over the line had been run the day before our visit, which was a festival day and throngs of people were visiting the nine-story pagoda standing on a high hill a mile outside the city limits. The day was one of great surprises to these people who had never before seen a passenger train, and my own person appeared to be a great curiosity to many. No boy ever scrutinized the face of a caged chimpanzee closer, with purer curiosity, or with less consideration for his feelings than did a woman of fifty scrutinize mine, standing close in front, not two feet distant, even bending forward as I sat upon a bench writing at the railway station. People would pass their hands along my coat sleeve to judge the cloth, and a boy felt of my shoes. Walking through the street we passed many groups gathered about tables and upon seats, visiting or in business conference, their fingers occupied with watermelon seeds or with packages of cooked snails. Along the pathway leading to the pagoda beggars had distributed themselves, one in a place, at intervals of two or three hundred feet, asking alms, most of them infirm with age or in some other way physically disabled.