But another figure is there, who takes no share in the harvesting. He is well dressed and does not have the air of a farmer about him. He has taken his seat on a bank or some place where he can keep his eye upon the whole of the joyous proceedings that are being carried on. Upon inquiry we find that he is an agent of the landlord, and has come to receive his half of the contents of the field. He has bags with him to put his share in, and when the rice is cut and at once threshed on the field, the half is duly measured and handed over to him. By this arrangement all arrears of rent are avoided, and the distress of feeling in debt to one's landlord is never experienced by the farmers of China. That their life is an anxious and a troubled one, I have shown very fully, and that sometimes their crops are too small to meet the needs of the family. These are inevitable in the very nature of things, but there is one thing that they are never troubled with, and that is excessive rents. Rack-renting is a thing from which they are mercifully preserved, and it is one sign of the common-sense of the Chinese, and of their instinct for fair play both for landlord and tenant, that the present system was initiated ages ago, and is still carried out all over the country. CHAPTER IX A RAMBLE THROUGH A CHINESE CITY Peculiarities of a Chinese town--Narrow streets--Smells--Mean-looking buildings--One storey--Description of a silk shop--Uncleanness the rule--Sights on the streets--Itinerant kitchen--Crowds on the streets--No rows--A mandarin and his retinue--Beggars--Fish market--Shoe street--No public-houses--An opium den. The sight of a Chinese city is something that one never forgets, for there are so many features about it that are absolutely new, that our minds are so impressed by what we see that a photograph of them is engraven upon our memories that will never be erased. Our conceptions of a city are those that we have gathered from those that we have seen in England, and we picture to ourselves wide streets with pavements on each side, where the foot passengers walk in comfort without having to jostle each other. We see, too, in imagination lofty houses, built with a certain degree of regularity and with taste about them. Cleanliness, too, is one of the things that we remember as being associated with it, whilst policemen day and night patrol the streets and preserve order amongst the people that travel along them. Cabs, and trams, and omnibuses crowded with passengers are the conspicuous objects that are to be met with in any moderate-sized towns in the homeland.