The Chinese have always displayed the greatest activity in order to assure themselves of their food at the expense of the vegetable world, sometimes from plants which are not cultivated, as from seaweeds, from which they obtain gelatine or a salty condiment, and particularly from those which they can perfect in their gardens. There are to be found in their kitchen gardens not only the most of our common vegetables, as turnips, carrots, radishes, onions, and our salad herbs, but some peculiar vegetables like the Chinese cabbage whose seeds furnish oil; the rapeseed, the young shoots of which are used in pickles, like those of mustard; fruits similar to our melons and cucumbers; enormous egg-plants, etc. If the garden contains a stream of water, as is frequent, they cultivate according to the depth of the water either aquatic grasses, of which they eat the terminal buds, or water plants like the lotus, or the Chinese cock’s-comb, of which all the parts furnish a nourishing fecula, or plants of the melon family, like the watermelon or the peculiar water chestnut, which is at times a scarlet red, and which they gather in the autumn. The picturesque way in which they gather these nuts is well described by M. Fauvel. Men, women and children embark on the canal in tubs, which they push with long bamboos about the floating islets of the chestnut, and which often capsize, to everyone’s great amusement. In some places one observes a singular culture of mushrooms. These cryptograms are greatly valued in China, and not alone on account of their nutritive properties. One species which takes root upon coming into the open air, and which is edible, has so dry a tissue that it keeps almost as fresh as when one gathers it ripe. Ancient writers took it for a symbol of immortality. It is particularly interesting to examine the Chinese orchards, distinguishing the productions of the north and south. The fruits of the south are less interesting: dates, cocoanut trees, mangoes, bananas, bread trees, pineapples, all tropical fruits which are not exclusively Chinese. The principal fruits of the north are first _the five fruits_, that is, the peach, apricot, plum, the chestnut and the jujube. The most important of Chinese fruit trees is the peach, which most probably is a native of the country. Its winter florescence has been taken by Chinese romance writers as the symbol of love and fidelity. Chinese orchards also furnish many other fruits: several kinds of plums, a fine white pear as round as our bergamot, the berries of the myrica, which pass very well for our strawberries, and which are easily mistaken for the arbute berry; but for general use nothing equals the Chinese figs and oranges. EIGHT CENTURIES WITH WALTER SCOTT. By WALLACE BRUCE.