For an hour we followed up the delta of the Yangtze, low, level land devoted to rice culture, splendidly tilled. The only remarkable thing about the landscape was dearth of population.
We passed no towns of any size. A lonesome railroad station, now and then some little mud-walled, straw-thatched hamlets. A like ride over such agricultural land in any of our Middle States at home would show much greater evidence of population.
Then for another hour a poor strip of territory, a hilly, semi-barren country, then we rolled out onto level plains which stayed with us until darkness shut out the scene.
From a little after noon till dark on a day in early June we passed through Illinois and Iowa land, prairies bounded by the horizon, with fields of waving wheat and barley just coming into harvest, and fields of corn and beans six inches high. And in all that seven or eight hours of travel, at an average speed of twenty-five miles an hour, we passed no city of any size.
Lonesome, solidly well-built brick railroad stations, at long intervals villages and hamlets, set back from the railroad, of the same one-story, mud-walled, thatched construction.
The wonder to me was: Where did the population live to till the land so thoroughly?—for it was all tilled like a well-kept garden. Where the early wheat and barley was harvested it was threshed on threshing floors, even as Boaz threshed his grain, and all of those millions of acres of grain we passed was cut either with a crude cradle or sickle, or pulled up by the roots; and the farm animals used were the caribou, the ox, and ass.
No fences, no wagon roads. Where one man's land ended and another man's began you'd never guess, viewed from the car windows.
And all that plain defaced with graves! Out in the fields, helter-skelter, here and there. Here a single grave, there two or three, again six in a row. Pa, and ma, and brother John, sister Ann, and Will, and baby Tim, were buried there. Pa had a big grave. Ma's not so large, and tapering down in size to a small one for baby Tim, all of the same pattern; a haycock-shaped mound of earth topped with a wad of mud.
I had it in for the geography I studied as a boy that told me of China's teeming population. That geography told me that China was so full of folks that to support the congested population they loaded dirt onto flat boats and moored those boats in rivers and utilized the ground thus made for gardens—and in that same geography lesson I learned that these boats were called flower boats.
The erudite writer of that geography got mixed in his metaphors. The flower boats of China have been pointed out to me in the rivers of China. They are places where "gilded youth" resort, and it is not garden truck they raise on them, but Sherman's definition of war—but let it pass.