This, after all, is the true secret of abundant crops. The land, in the South of China at least, is mostly of a poor and indifferent character. Along the courses of rivers and in the alluvial valleys it is rich enough, and produces splendid crops year after year. But when you get beyond these, and come into the hilly regions, you touch upon territories that are exceedingly reluctant, excepting when they are liberally supplied with manures, to produce crops that are worth the gathering. The Chinese farmer has no scientific knowledge as to how he should best develop his farm, but he knows by experience that unless the land is coaxed and petted with an ample supply of manures, no acquaintance with the art of farming will avail to cover it with the harvests that will keep his family from hunger, and that will still leave a margin to be sold in the market to bring enough to meet the incidental expenses of the home. The list of fertilizers in China is a very brief one, and bones and beancake are two important ones in it, but the one that stands the first and foremost in the estimation of the farmers throughout the country is nightsoil. This is the one that is universally used because it is the cheapest, and also because it is the only really available one. The system by which that important manure is collected and distributed is a thoroughly perfect one, and ages of practice has made the managers of this intricate business so well up in it that there is never any hitch in it. The towns and cities, and any place indeed where a considerable population has collected, are so relieved of their accumulations that the Government is never called upon to interfere, nor are sanitary inspectors ever appointed to see to their cleanliness or to prevent the people from suffering from insanitary conditions. A regular trade is carried on between the towns and the farms that lie in all directions around them in this particular manure, and the farmers' wives, who are the principal carriers of it, will come into town in the early morning and carry it miles away to their houses in all directions throughout the country places. On one occasion I had started out from a large city of at least a hundred thousand people and had got a few miles from it, when I overtook twenty or thirty young farmers' wives carrying their purchases in buckets slung on bamboo poles resting on their shoulders, and a merrier set of women it would have been difficult to have met with.