I found that China is not a densely populated country, as is generally supposed. The seashore is fairly crowded, and the impression one gets from seeing the surface of the water covered at Canton with rafts and floats on which more than 100,000 persons live, is that the inhabitants must swarm in the same degree over the face of the land. This is not the case. Even the coast is merely fringed with people. Back in the interior there are no such dense masses of population. All accounts that I can read of the interior, from Father Huc down to Mr. Parsons of New York, bear me out in this. I can not see where there are more than 175,000,000, or 150,000,000, people in that empire. The reports of the slaughter in the Tai-ping rebellion, of some 20,000,000 people, would seem to indicate a population of at least 200,000,000 or 250,000,000; but these figures were greatly exaggerated, as all such things are in China. All statistics are nothing but guesswork, and the bigger they are the better people like them. I engaged passage in the Greta, which was to go to Shimoda and Hakodate, Japan. My objective point was Yokohama, where it was my purpose to establish a branch of the house of Train & Co., Melbourne. My Australian house was not connected with Colonel Train's Boston and Liverpool packet firm. At this time, however, the English and Russians, who were not as good friends then as they are now, were fighting, and the little war completely upset all of my plans. I could not get to Yokohama at all, and did not visit Japan until several years later. I had, therefore, to give up my passage in the Greta, and turn my face from Japan. Just at this point, Augustine Heard invited G. Griswold Gray, of Russell & Co., and me to go to Fu-chow, on one of his sailing ships, the John Wade. [Illustration: George Francis Train dictating his autobiography in his room in the Mills Hotel.]