The tide in the Yang-tze and its branch, the Woosung, runs with tremendous force, having a rise and fall of eighteen feet at spring tides, and few ships are able to proceed beyond Woosung with a single tide, Shanghai lying twelve miles above. They anchor among a fleet of native junks from the trading places on the Yang-tze, bound to the same port, and awaiting a change of tide, which the Chinese sailors celebrate by a great hubbub on the poops of their unwieldy-looking vessels, with tom-toms and other instruments of the same nature. This fleet of junks and sampans is a curious sight to the stranger approaching the China coast for the first time, and, with a ramble through the filthy village of Woosung, occupies the time which the tides compel him to spend there. The junks give proof that if there have been great changes in the trade of China and in the appearance of the cities where foreigners have established themselves, there certainly has been none in the mode of ship building, and in the thousand curious and uncouth ways of working, acting, and living which have been for generations handed down from father to son, and which are at the present time in no ways altered from what they were a thousand years ago. No people in the world are slower in admitting the ideas of foreign nations, or in taking advantage of the most obvious improvements daily before their eyes; and, although the improvements introduced by English and Americans in steamers and vessels adapted for the navigation of their rivers are so far acknowledged by them as to lead to the discontinuance of junk building to a marked extent, yet the vessels they now build are of the same uncouth, clumsy, and expensive shape as the first they ever put on the stocks. Their anchors are still of wood, and occupy the greater part of the vessel before the foremast; and, instead of cables, they still have immense coils of rough rope like a hair lariat. The sails are still of bamboo mats, although occasionally a piece of good American or English duck is to be seen, stretched on bamboos in the style of the old-fashioned square sail, and once, on the river Min, we saw a native pilot-boat rigged with the regular fore-and-aft cut, her sails having evidently been fashioned by a foreign hand. Out of hundreds of junks moored in the Woosung river it was impossible to find one without the great staring eye under what is called, by courtesy, the bows, and not a few of them had the open mouth of a dragon, with ugly teeth, painted under it, near the water-line, the corners being drawn down, and the eye (from their desire that it should see 'all ways at once') having a horrid squint. This gave to the boat a lugubrious expression--if such a term may be allowed--ludicrous in the extreme; and with fifty or a hundred junks drawn up in squadrons, squinting and making faces at each other, nothing more thoroughly Chinese could well be imagined.