III.
TO HONGKONG AND CANTON.
We had come to learn how the old-world farmers had
been able to provide materials for food and clothing on such
small areas for so many millions, at so low a price, during
so many centuries, and were anxious to see them at the
soil and among the crops. The sun was still south of the
equator, coming north only about twelve miles per day,
so, to save time, we booked on the next steamer for Hongkong
to meet spring at Canton, beyond the Tropic of
Cancer, six hundred miles farther south, and return with her.
On the morning of March 4th the Tosa Maru steamed out into the Yangtse river, already flowing with the increased speed of ebb tide. The pilots were on the bridge to guide her course along the narrow south channel through waters seemingly as brown and turbid as the Potomac after a rain. It was some distance beyond Gutzlaff Island, seventy miles to sea, where there is a lighthouse and a telegraph station receiving six cables, that we crossed the front of the out-going tide, showing in a sharp line of contrast stretching in either direction farther than the eye could see, across the course of the ship and yet it was the season of low water in this river. During long ages this stream of mighty volume has been loading upon itself in far-away Tibet, without dredge, barge, fuel or human effort, unused and there unusable soils, bringing them down from inaccessible hights across two or three thousand miles, building up with them, from under the sea, at the gateways of commerce, miles upon miles of the world's most fertile fields
