The fishermen are absolutely content. They spend their lives on these boats. Men are married upon them, and children are born upon them and grow up to be men and women, and men lie down and die upon them, and from them they are carried to their long homes on the shore, which during their lifetime they have looked upon as a place where they had no inheritance, but which perforce would have to give them a narrow space when they had finished with life, in which to hide them away from the world.
The boats I have described are but a sample of the multitude of ways in which the Chinese are circumscribed and prevented by forces greater than the enactment of special laws from making progress in their national life. There are signs at the present moment that China is awakening and that the dead hand of the past is being lifted. It will be long, however, before the new movement will permeate into the villages and into the more retired and out-of-the-way places of the Empire, where under the shadow of lofty mountains, and out of the lines where human thought and human traffic are most vigorous, men cling to the traditions of the past. But that the movement will spread and finally change the whole character of the country, there is not the least shadow of a doubt.
A STREET SCENE.
To face p. 131.
CHAPTER VII
AMUSEMENTS