The first harvest is reaped in the end of May or beginning of June, the grain being cut with a small sickle, and carried off the field in frames suspended from bamboo poles placed across a man’s shoulders. Barrow (p. 565) thus describes one: ‘The machine usually employed for clearing rice from the husk, in the large way, is exactly the same as that now used in Egypt for the same purpose, only that the latter is put in motion by oxen and the former commonly by water. This machine consists of a long horizontal axis of wood, with cogs, or projecting pieces of wood or iron, fixed upon it at certain intervals, and it is turned by a water-wheel. At right angles to this axis are fixed as many horizontal levers as there are circular rows of cogs; these levers act on pivots that are fastened into a low brick wall, but parallel to the axis and at the distance of about two feet from it. At the further extremity of each lever, and perpendicular to it, is fixed a hollow pestle, directly over a large mortar of stone or iron sunk into the ground; the other extremity extending beyond the wall, being pressed upon by the cogs of the axis in its rotation, elevates the pestle, which by its own gravity falls into the mortar. An axis of this kind sometimes gives motion to 15 or 20 levers.’ Meantime the stubble is burnt on the land, over which the ashes are spread as its only manure; a second crop is immediately sown, and reaped about the end of October, when the straw is left to putrify on the ground, which is allowed to rest till the commencement of the ensuing spring. As the cereal food of the Chinese is principally boiled rice, it stands to reason that bakers are not numerous, bread only appearing at the tables of high-class mandarins. It is chiefly replaced by fancy biscuits and numberless kinds of pastry, made not only with wheaten flour, but also that of rice—these serve as vehicles for the various jams and fruit _compotes_ for which the Chinese are famous, and which they know so well how to make; in fact, the bakers are more strictly confectioners, and they can be seen any day busy in their shops baking cakes of rice flour and ground almonds of every imaginable shape and varied in quality by spices. Not only so, but these cakes are sold, already baked, in the peripatetic cookeries which go about the streets. Out of wheaten flour they make a kind of vermicelli, which is much esteemed by the Chinese.