To visit Canton the steamboat should be taken that leaves Hong-Kong daily. The trip of 7 hours’ duration will be enlivened by the noisy Chinese passengers on board, and by the numerous Chinese junks constantly passed as they are going up and down the river under sails and oars. The traveller will also encounter some Europeans, who will gladly tell him good stories and put him up at their snug little club-house on the Shameen, the island connected with Canton, where the white population resides. Canton should be seen; it is a typical Chinese city into which modern civilization has made no visible headway. Returning to Hong-Kong, the water-front offers much that is attractive. Thousands of junks lie in rows, anchored off the harbor, and thousands more are moored along the sea-wall; the noise made by the crews of these boats, beating gongs, firing crackers, singing, shouting, and burning papers and joss-sticks to their favorite Buddhas, is pandemonium. On shore coolies trot about in couples, with long bamboo-poles on their shoulders, transporting chests of tea, silk, matting, etc., from the junks to the big storehouses and from the storehouses to the lighters to be towed alongside the steamers, where the bales are hoisted into the holds. [Illustration: Landing Passengers at Natal, South Africa.] At this port the traveller will find a newly organized transpacific service, running by way of Yokohama to Vancouver, where connection is made with the Canadian Pacific Railway to Quebec and Halifax, and thence to London. The line, as at present formed, consists of three magnificent steamers, sailing monthly. The Empress of India, the pioneer of the line, made the voyage early in 1891 from Yokohama to Vancouver in the unprecedented time of 10 days and 15 hours. Observing the steamers closely, the traveller will discover that one of them is flying a different flag from those he has been accustomed to see while on the journey along the great Indian Ocean highway: the stars-and-stripes belong to one of the vessels of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company of the United States. The Pacific Mail Steamship Company was organized in 1847, at the time of the colonization of the Pacific States, and gained notoriety by despatching one of its first vessels, the California, from New York, in 1848, to San Francisco by way of Cape Horn. The successful termination of this extraordinary performance, in those early days of steam navigation, enabled the company to inaugurate a steamship service between Panama and San Francisco. The route thus opened was from New York to Colon (Aspinwall), and thence across the Isthmus to Panama, where the steamer was in waiting to run up the Mexican coast to California. The transpacific route was commenced in 1867, soon after the opening of the Pacific Railroad, and is now worked in conjunction with an English line, the Oriental & Occidental.