A most pathetic commentary on the national feeling of helplessness with regard to the question of death is seen in the graves that form so conspicuous an object in any landscape that may be seen in any part of China. The overwhelming population that must have peopled the plains and valleys and mountain sides of this great country may in no uncertain manner be estimated from the prodigious number of tombs that project themselves upon one's attention everywhere. The one marked feature about every one of these is the utter absence of any indication that the living have any conception of where the dead have gone to. The gravestones are absolutely silent on this point. In Christian cemeteries they speak with affection of those that are gone, and they predict a joyful union in the future, whilst some of them at least declare with confidence the happy lot in the unseen world of beloved ones that have been snatched away by death from those who have been left mourning their loss here. A Chinese tombstone is usually stereotyped in the cold and dreary statement it has to make about those who lie beneath it. On the top is the name of the dynasty or of the place where the person was born, then in a perpendicular line in the centre of it is the sex and family name of the deceased. To the left, in smaller letters, is the name of their sons, and positively nothing else. There is no loving record of their virtues, and no hope expressed as to any meeting them in the future. They seem to have dropped completely out of life, as far as any mention is made of them. It is true that in the worship at the graves on the "Feast of Tombs," and in the ancestral temples on the anniversary of their death, they are spoken to as though they were still living; but they are approached on those occasions not in the loving and affectionate way that was done when they were alive, but rather as spirits that must be propitiated in order to send blessings on their former homes, or coaxed into good humour so as to cause them to refrain from hurling calamities upon the friends whom they have left behind them. But whilst death is a secret that none may fathom, it has not led men to give up in despair the hopes of solving it. The Chinese, whilst feeling themselves unable to find out what lies behind it, have built up a mythical and yet at the same time a very human conception of what the "Shadowy World" is supposed to be like. Having nothing to guide them in their thoughts but the world of matter around them, they have imagined that Hades is an exact counterpart of China, and that it has its emperor and great and small mandarins, and provinces and counties with exactly the same names that these have in the actual and visible lands of the Celestial Empire.