It does not cost much to build a little bamboo house after the native fashion. For example, Miss Cort paid for one of her schoolhouses at Petchaburee, fourteen by twenty-two feet, only $6.38 for the materials, including a lock and key; $5.44 for the wages of the men and women who built it――making the entire cost $11.82. But then we should think it a very queer schoolhouse, with its basket-like walls of woven bamboo, its roof of leaves sewed together, its three little windows without any glass, and two doors; nor would its strangeness be less striking if we saw the native teacher and children all sitting on the floor. But things move slowly in these warm Eastern countries. If you want to build a more substantial house, you must begin by buying earth to make the bricks, and oftentimes rough logs to be worked up into boards; and, though labor is cheap, a day’s work in Indo-China will not mean anything like as much accomplished as in the same space of time in America. In the useful arts the inhabitants of this peninsula are far behind Chinese and Hindoos, though there are said to be ingenious workers in copper and iron, and in the manufacture of gold and silver vessels they display considerable skill. Agriculture is the main employment of the natives. In many parts of this peninsula the land is prepared by turning in the buffaloes during the rainy season to trample down weeds and stir the soil, which is afterward harrowed by a coarse rake or thorny shrub, the stubble being burnt and the ash worked in as manure. But the Chinese are everywhere introducing improved methods. The best quality of rice is transplanted, the plants lying partially covered in the still pools of water between the rectangular ridges marked off for the purpose of irrigation; and rice growing above the rising water looks very like a field of wheat or tall grass. At high-flood seasons it is a pretty sight to see the planters moving about in boats attending to their crops. The growth is almost spontaneous. Little care is needed until the whole family must turn out to drive off the immense flocks of little rice-birds. The rice is sown in June, transplanted in September and harvested late in December or in January. In the fields at this season may be seen the reapers, multitudes of sheaves and stacks of grain. The rice is generally threshed by buffaloes, a hard circle being formed around each stack. The carts have large wheels, four or five feet apart, with the sheaves placed in a small rack. The driver guides the oxen by means of ropes fastened in the septum of their noses, reminding one of the Scripture, “I will put my hook in his nose.”