The observations which may be made with regard to the industry of Chinese boys, are equally applicable--_mutatis mutandis_--to Chinese girls. In all lands and in all climes, "woman's work is never done," and this is most especially true of China, where machinery has not yet expelled the primitive processes of what is literally manufacture, or work by the hand. The care of silk-worms, and the picking, spinning, and weaving of cotton, are largely the labour of women, to which the girls are introduced at a very early age. The sewing for a Chinese family is a serious matter, especially as the number of families who can afford to hire help in this line is a very trifling proportion. But aside from this employment, in which a Chinese girl who expects to be acceptable to the family of her mother-in-law must be expert, girls can also be made useful in almost any line of home work to which the father may be devoted. In the country districts all over the empire, boys and girls alike are sent out to scratch together as much fuel as possible, for the preparation of the food, and this continues in the case of the girls until they are too large to go to any distance from home. It is not an unmeaning appellation, which is given to girls generally, that of _ya-t'ou_, or "slave-girl," used just as we should say "daughter." To a foreigner, this sounds much like the term "nigger" applied to black men, but to the Chinese there is a fitness in the designation, which they refuse to surrender. With the exception of such limited raids as she may have been able to make in early childhood, and occasional visits to relatives, most Chinese girls never go anywhere to speak of, and live what is literally the existence of a frog in a well.[2] Tens of thousands of them have never been two miles away from the village in which they happened to be born, with the occasional exception of the visit to the mother's family just mentioned, where they are not improbably regarded as terrible beings who cannot be exterminated, but who are to be as much as possible repressed. If the nieces on the mother's side are numerous, as is often the case, there is some reason for dread of the visits, on the part of the bread-winners, for no Chinese mother can be dissociated from her flock of children, whose appetites are invariably several horse-power strong, and who, like their elders, are all excessively fond of enjoying the pleasure of eating at some one else's expense. [Illustration: WOMEN PREPARING FOOD.] [Illustration: ON THE WAY TO THE FEAST.]