though shallow is a hundred feet wide. Another stream is crossed, too, on the road to Tah-ming-zee, over a bridge of planks and trussels 250 feet in length. Tah ming-zee, a place of 400 families, is one mile S. W.from Shang-chune.—Mulberry and Tallow tree, growing over a sandy soil, are met in several places on the road.
Hoi-yen, a hamlet of 30 families, is two mile sou' west from Tah-ming-zee. The devotion exhibited by the old women of this neighbourhood in telling beads and muttering the Buddhist chant of O-me-to-fah or veh is remarkable; and if such acts could atone for sins or obtain the wished for good fortune, success would be sure from the zeal displayed Occasionally, in road side temples, old women and men in threes and fours may be seen perpetrating for themselves services prescribed in papers sold at some monastery of notoriety, and to reach which they make extensive pilgrimages. Seated at a table together, all repeating the mystic words till both tongue and brain must ache with the repetition, one counts beads, another, at each revoiution of the string, moves from a bundle, a sanctified joss stick, the act being signalized by a third with a tap on a small bell, by another with a rap on a skull-like drum, and so on until the prescribed number of joss sticks is expended, and the service finished. Of all the intellect-stultifying devices superstitiously conceived, Buddhism must be the most successful. Happy the day when the devotion now so uselessly expended is given in the exercise of a rational religion! Speaking of them as a body, the Chinese are, intrinsically, a very God fearing people, and Christianity once introduced will have ardent and faithful practisers.
