I could hardly believe my ears, for as far as I knew a game of cricket had never been played at Peking, even by Englishmen, there being no suitable ground, and it was only by plying him with questions that I elicited it was the cricket of the hearth to which he alluded, and that his club was a gambling-house to which young men brought their crickets, there to fight grim duels in a basin for the championship, while noble owners staked considerable sums on the prowess of their diminutive gladiators and stimulated their energies by tickling them with straws. On all the waterways of China enormous flocks of tame ducks are to be seen. These flocks generally number several thousands of birds each and are carefully herded by the duck farmer and his sons, who swim them about from place to place in search of suitable feeding-grounds. On the Yangtse I have seen them in mid-stream floating down in compact masses with the racing current and surrounded by their guardians in tubs, who, armed with long bamboos, smartly whack any bird which may happen to stray away from the flock until it rejoins its companions. These ducks are apparently always of one age, be it a month, three months or full-grown, which fact had ever been a source of mild surprise to me, in view of the number of simultaneous broods which would be necessary to hatch off such swarms, until the matter was explained. A friend of mine gave a tiffin party of four good men and true on his stern-wheel house-boat, the motive power for which was supplied by half-a-dozen coolies driving the wheel with their feet, on the same principle as the tread-mill, and we were gliding up the Taipa Channel near Macao at about four knots, when suddenly our craft came into a sea of egg-shells sailing gaily before the breeze and having at a short distance much the appearance of water-lilies. For a quarter of an hour or so we ploughed through these shells, which must have numbered tens of thousands, making various conjectures as to their origin, until our host, who had been below superintending the icing of the champagne, came on deck and explained that they undoubtedly were from an incubator in which ducks had just been hatched. This was new to me, so I asked him for details, but he replied that beyond knowing of the incubators and that they were made of manure and lime in which eggs were buried until hatched, he had not been able to procure further information. Since then I have made many inquiries, but the Chinese will reveal little beyond the fact that incubators "have always existed" for the hatching of ducks and geese.