In China, the rice field are in the flood lands along the big rivers. There, it is often a question of keeping the water out when it is not wanted. So banks have to be built, and treadmill pumps used. And the rivers themselves, filled with water as thick and brown as bean soup, are dredged with baskets to bring up the rich soil to spread on the fields. Tens of thousands of men work these treadmills and dredging baskets by hand. Men are even hitched to rude, wooden plows. Blind-folded water buffaloes walk patiently around and around the pumps. As in japan, nothing is wasted. Straw is cut off at the roots. It is woven into hats and sandals, matting and bagging. Roots are carefully burned and the ashes scattered to fertilize the fields.
In Burma, the banks of the Irawadi River is one long rice field. Water buffalo drag wooden plows and log harrows. Women and children punch holes in the mud with their fingers and set the plants. There "every one works but father." He sits on a flowery bank and smokes and sees that his family keeps busy. The grain is threshed by the water buffalo that trample it on hard ground. In India, the swarming people are terribly poor. They scratch the earth to dust with pointed sticks, weed and flood the land, cut the grain with sickles or little knives, pound the husks off in wooden mortars and do every part of the work by hand.
If you look in a big Geography you can find all these countries —Japan, China, India, Burma, Siam and Malay peninsula in a big continent called Asia. The hundreds of millions of people who live in these countries are mostly yellow. Some are white, and down in Malay they are brown. Rice is the bread of all of these people. And trailing out into the sea, from Malay and japan, are hundreds and thousands of big and little islands where chiefly brown people live. Our Philippine Islands are among them, and they alone have ten million people. In all these lands and sea islands, rice is grown in much the same way, by the hardest hand labor. In java the small brown people put little temples, like pigeon houses, in the rice fields, in honor of a goddess who blesses their labor. To these temples they bring gifts of food—sugar cane, ripe fruit and bowls of boiled rice to keep her in a good temper. For oh, they all know that they may work hard, and still the wind and rain and sun may go wrong, and the crop fail. Then they are poor indeed!
But in many of these warm islands, there are bananas and pine- apples and cocoanuts, and other good things to eat growing wild,
