Into the harvest-field is often brought a large wooden tub about four feet in diameter by three feet high, and the reaper, having cut an armful of rice, takes it by the straw end and threshes the ears five or six times with great force over the side, so that the grain falls into the tub, which, when thus filled, is replaced by an empty one and taken to the threshing-floor, where the contents are thrown up by shovels-full into the air, the breeze blowing the chaff to one side and the winnowed rice falling in a heap by itself. When the crop is not thus threshed in the harvest-field it is stacked at the farm, and sometimes in the low forks of large trees to remove it from the danger of possible floods, subsequently to be trodden out by oxen on the threshing-floor or beaten out by the farmer and his family with light basket-work flails on bamboo shafts. In villages and small towns where many houses adjoin, it is a common practice to paint or dye young chickens as soon as they are hatched, so that each housewife may know her own. One woman will colour hers a bright red, another will use blue, another green, and so on, the appearance of these strikingly-coloured little creatures intermingled in the streets being exceedingly droll and novel to Europeans. Amongst all classes of Chinese, from beggars to Academicians, belief in ghosts, dreams and the supernatural generally is absolute and unshakable. If you express doubt or scepticism they will readily agree with you from a certain nervousness of being thought ridiculous, as well as from a feeling of the futility of any attempt to persuade Europeans of the soundness of such convictions. In the autumn of 1899, when at Shasi, which is an unthriving town nine hundred miles up the Yangtse, and where another Englishman and I were the then only Europeans residing amongst a dense, hostile population, which only a few weeks previously had burnt down all foreign houses and forced the inmates to flee for their lives in small boats, two of the most remarkable cases of this universal superstition came directly under my notice. At that time one of those rebellions which are a chronic feature of Chinese Society was in full bloom in the neighbouring province of Szechwan, where an individual named Yue Man-tze was heading a crusade against Christians and foreign influence, when at least one French father was slain and another held in prolonged captivity, despite all efforts of the local officials to effect his release. The doings of this redoubtable brigand were naturally our chief topic of daily conversation, and a very intelligent and highly-educated Chinese gentleman, who kept me informed of local events, said that the natives generally credited him with mystic powers. "Of course," he added, eyeing me suspiciously, "it cannot be true, still, it is current gossip in all the tea-shops."