``There are twice as many people in China as on the four continents-- Africa, North and South America and Oceanica. Every third person who toils under the sun and sleeps under God's stars is a Chinese. Every third child born into the world looks into the face of a Chinese mother. Every third pair given in marriage plight their troth in a Chinese cup of wine. Every third orphan weeping through the day every third widow wailing through the night are in China. Put them in rank, joining hands, and they will girdle the globe ten times at the equator with living, beating human hearts. Constitute them pilgrims and let two thousand go past every day and night under the sunlight and under the solemn stars, and you must hear the ceaseless tramp, tramp, of the weary, pressing, throbbing throng for five hundred years.''[2] [2] The Rev. J. T. Gracey, D. D., ``China in Outline,'' p. 10. There is something amazing in the immensity of the population. Great cities are surprisingly numerous. In America, a city of nearly a million inhabitants is a wonderful place and all the world is supposed to know about it. But while Canton and Tien-tsin are tolerably familiar names, how many in the United States ever heard of Hsiang-tan-hsien ? Yet Hsiang-tan- hsien is said to have 1,000,000 inhabitants, while within comparatively short distances are other great cities and innumerable villages. In the Swatow region, within a territory a hundred and fifty miles long and fifty miles wide, there are no less than ten walled cities of from 40,000 to 250,000 inhabitants, besides hundreds of towns and villages ranging from a few hundred to 25,000 or 30,000 people. Men never tire of writing about the population adjacent to New York, Boston and Chicago. But in five weeks' constant journeying through the interior of the Shantung Province, there was hardly an hour in which multitudes were not in sight. There are no scattered farmhouses as in America, but the people live in villages and towns, the latter strongly walled and even the former often have a mud wall. As the country is comparatively level, it was easy to count them, and as a rule there were a dozen or more in plain view. I recall a memorable morning. It was Friday, June 28, 1901. We had risen early, and by daylight we had breakfasted, and started our carts and litters. In our enjoyment of the cool, delicious morning air, we walked for several li. Just before the sun rose, we crossed a low ridge and from its crest, I counted no less than thirty villages in front of us, while behind there were about as many more, the average population being apparently about 500 each. For days at a time, my road lay through the narrow, crowded street of what seemed to be an almost continuous village, the intervening farms being often hardly more than a mile in width.