The innumerable patchwork of civilization—the poignant verdure of the young rice; the somber green of orange-groves; the lines of tea-shrubs, well hoed, and showing the bare earth beneath; the pollard mulberries; the plots of cotton and maize and wheat and yam and clover; the little brown and green tiled cottages with spreading recurbed eaves, the clumps of feathery bamboo, or of sugar-canes;
The endless silver threads of irrigation canals and ditches, skirting the hills for scores and hundreds of miles, tier above tier, and serpentining down to the lower slopes and plains—
The accumulated result, these, of centuries upon centuries of ingenious industry, and innumerable public and private benefactions, continued from age to age;
The grand canal of the Delta plain extending, a thronged waterway, for seven hundred miles, with sails of junks and bankside villages innumerable;
The chain-pumps, worked by buffaloes or men, for throwing the water up slopes and hillsides, from tier to tier, from channel to channel;
The endless rills and cascades flowing down again into pockets and hollows of verdure, and on fields of steep and plain;
The bits of rock and wildwood left here and there, with the angles of Buddhist or Jain temples projecting from among the trees;
The azalea and rhododendron bushes, and the wild deer and pheasants unharmed;
The sounds of music and the gong—the Sin-fa sung at eventide—and the air of contentment and peace pervading;
A garden you might call the land, for its wealth of crops and flowers,