Our winter here has no severity. Season dear to the philosopher, these bare trees, this yellow grass, sufficiently attest the passing of the time, without atrocious cold or unnecessary violence. In this twelfth month, cemeteries and kitchen gardens, and a country mounded everywhere with tombs, spread out in dull productivity. The clumps of blue bamboo, the somber pines above the sepulchers, the gray-green reed-grass, arrest and satisfy one’s gaze. The yellow flowers of the New Year’s Candlestick and the waxen berries of the Soot Tree give a real beauty to the somber picture. I proceed in peace across this temperate region. Now it is night. It would be vain to wait, stationed in the bow of this junk, for the reflection of our wooden anchor to trace on the beatified water the image of that waning moon which only midnight holds for us. All is dark; but as we move on, propelled by the scull which steers our prow, we need not fear mistaking our way. These canals permit of numberless detours. Let us pursue the voyage with tranquillity, our eyes on yonder solitary star. THE HALT ON THE CANAL Now,--passing the place where old men and women congregate, driven from their far-off villages by the need of food, and traveling on rafts made of their house-doors, guided by the domestic duck,--encountering waters which seem as if they were flooded with rice, that they may fitly enter into a region of opulence; pushing across this large and rectilinear canal which bounds the rude high wall enclosing the city and its people, where the exaggerated arch of a bridge frames with evening the crenelated tower of a gate opening on the dark countryside; by the wharf we tie up our boat among square stone tombs in the grass, the crude material of epitaphs. With day our investigation begins. We become entangled in a maze of Chinese streets, murky and moist with domestic odors. For a long time we follow the narrow footpath in the turmoil of the market-place, in the midst of a people mixed in with their dwellings as bees are with their wax and honey. I recall a little girl winding a skein of green silk, a barber cleaning the ear of his client with a fine pincer like the antennæ of a crawfish; a little donkey turning a millstone near an oil warehouse, the dark quiet of a pharmacy within whose depths, through the gilded frame of a moon-shaped door, two red candles flame before the name of the apothecary. We traverse many courts, more than a hundred bridges.