Tche-Kiang, through which they so leisurely traveled, is, perhaps, the most fertile and beautiful of the eighteen provinces of China, and large enough to contain the whole of Scotland and its adjacent islands. Besides rivers, it is watered by some sixty canals, which serve not only as an easy method of transit, but so to irrigate the great plains around that they yield crops of rice, pulse, and cotton, twice and sometimes thrice a year. It was pleasant to watch these canals pouring forth their sparkling limpid streams to lave the feet of the neighboring hills and mountains, which for many miles presented an aspect of singular beauty; some, like carved and nature painted pyramids, being wrought into terraces, which shot one out of the other, teeming with the yellow grain, cotton, or tea-trees, while others were thickly sprinkled with shady trees, which waved over sloping cemeteries of quaintly shaped tombs and temples. It was a charming picture--nature dressed to the verge of foppery--more, it was a glorious land, and smiling as if in pride at its power of blessing the human race--and more again, that its owners knew its worth and industriously stretched its blessings to the utmost. Then the boat came to a dike, or sluice, and they were about to enter another canal at least fifteen feet beneath their level. To pass this, the barge was hoisted by Coolies up an inclined plain of freestone by means of ropes upon capstans and sheer strength of muscle, then gently let down a slope upon the other side into the water, a mode adopted to the present day to move even the largest vessels from canal to canal. Thus pleasantly the young travelers were wafted through the province, now through vast plains of rice, then by the sides of great hills clustering with the tea-plant, on again through vast orchards of mulberry-trees and the useful and curious tallow-plant; then again through plantations of bamboo, that inseparable companion of the Chinaman from the cradle to the grave--for it receives the infant, corrects the boy, is the means of living for the man, and entwines the corpse. Then again they passed through towns and cities, swarming with busy workers at the silk-loom and multifarious handicrafts, and toiling children, women, and men in the fields, till they passed another dike, and then they were upon the beautiful lake Tsao-hou, about the naming of which the following pretty story is told:--