II.
GRAVE LANDS OF CHINA.
The launch had returned the passengers to the steamer
at 11:30; the captain was on the bridge; prompt to the
minute at the call “Hoist away” the signal went below
and the Yamaguchi's whistle filled the harbor and
overflowed the hills. The cable wound in, and at twelve, noon,
we were leaving Nagasaki, now a city of 153,000 and the
western doorway of a nation of fifty-one millions of people
but of little importance before the sixteenth century when
it became the chief mart of Portuguese trade. We were to
pass the Koreans on our right and enter the portals of a
third nation of four hundred millions. We had left a
country which had added eighty-five millions to its population
in one hundred years and which still has twenty acres
for each man, woman and child, to pass through one which
has but one and a half acres per capita, and were going
to another whose allotment of acres, good and bad, is less
than 2.4. We had gone from practices by which three
generations had exhausted strong virgin fields, and were
coming to others still fertile after thirty centuries of
cropping. On January 30th we crossed the head waters of the
Mississippi-Missouri, four thousand miles from its mouth,
and on March 1st were in the mouth of the Yangtse river
whose waters are gathered from a basin in which dwell
two hundred millions of people.
The Yamaguchi reached Woosung in the night and anchored to await morning and tide before ascending the Hwangpoo, believed by some geographers to be the middle
