The Chinese, therefore, have had long experience in the art of cultivating the soil, and out of this has been developed the touch in their fingers that nature recognizes and responds to so readily. They seem to have no trouble in making things grow. Apparently without any effort they plough their land and scatter their seed with careless hand, and granting that the rain falls with tolerable regularity, everything springs up just as they have planned. After passing through a number of villages and hamlets, and small market towns, all frowsy and slattern-looking, and pervaded with the Oriental bad smells wherever a human habitation exists, we came late in the afternoon to the mouth of a wide river, where our land journey was to end, and where we were to continue it by boat until we should reach our destination. In order to get to our boat, which we had arranged should meet us at this place, we had to cross the bridge that spanned the river here to get to the other side where it lay awaiting us. This bridge is a famous one, and is a very fine specimen of what the Chinese builders can do in the construction of such. It consists of about twenty-five spans, the widest of which is sixty-five feet, whilst the others vary somewhat in their measurements. As the river flows here with a very rapid current, and moreover is liable to sudden rises after heavy rains in the interior, it was essential, in the erecting of this bridge, that it should be built so strongly that it would be able to stand not only the wear and tear of the ever-flowing river, but also the mighty strain of the deluge of waters that comes roaring down the gorges that lie above it either after some tempest, or in consequence of an unusual downpour during the rainy season in the spring. The great width between each pier was not a matter of choice but of necessity. To have placed them any nearer to each other might have risked their being swept away by the river tide, which when swollen by the storms of summer rolls down with prodigious volume and force over the very spot where the bridge had to be built. It was also equally necessary that the slabs of stone that composed the roadway of the bridge should be enormously heavy, so that they might be able to resist the impetus of the flood that would at times roll over them and yet not be strong enough to lift them from their positions and hurl them down the river.