coldness, and desolation--in fact, a vast inland sea, as many of the large boats at a distance were hull down. The swamps on the following day were kept out of sight by some decent villages on the high banks, which from perpetual accumulation assumed in some places the aspect of hills. “A part of our journey on the first of October lay along a portion of the canal where the banks, particularly to the right, were elaborately and thoroughly faced with stone; a precaution which seemed to imply a greater than ordinary danger from inundations. In fact, the lakes, or rather floods, seemed to extend at present nearly to the feet of the mountains which lay at a distance on our left. We were now approaching that part of China which is exposed to the disastrous overflowings of the Yellow River, a perpetual source of wasteful expenditure to the government, and of peril and calamity to the people; it well deserves the name of China’s Sorrow. We observed the repairs of the banks diligently proceeding under the superintendence of the proper officer. For this purpose they use the natural soil in combination with the thick stalks of the gigantic millet.” The canal reaches the Yellow River about 70 miles from its mouth; but before leaving the lakes in the southern part of Shantung, it used to run nearly parallel with that stream for more than a hundred miles, and between it and the New Salt River during a good part of this distance. It is hard to understand how, by natural causes, so powerful a river, as it is described to be by the historians of both the British embassies less than one hundred years ago, should have become so completely choked up. The difference of level near Kaifung is found to be so very little that the siltage there has been enough to turn the current into the river Wei and elsewhere. When Amherst’s embassy passed, the boats struck right across the stream, and gained the opposite bank, about three-fourths of a mile distant, in less than an hour. They drifted about two miles down, and then slowly brought up against the current to the spot where the canal entered. This opening was a sluice nearly a hundred yards across, and through it the waters rushed into the river like a mill-race; the banks were constructed of earth, strengthened with sorghum stalks, and strongly bound with cordage. Sir John Davis remarks, with the instinct of a tradesman, as he commends the perseverance and industry which had overcome these obstacles, that if the science of a Brunel could be allowed to operate on the Yellow River and Grand Canal, “a benefit might be conferred on the Chinese that would more than compensate for all the evil that we have inflicted with our opium and our guns.” The boats were dragged through and up the sluice close to the bank by ropes communicating with large windlasses worked on the bank, which safely, though slowly, brought them into still water.