It is very important that their feet should be bound short so that they can walk beautifully with mincing steps, swaying gracefully, and thus showing to all that they are persons of respectability." Apart from the Manchus, the dominant race, whose women do not bind their feet, all chaste Chinese girls have small feet.

Those who have large feet are either, speaking generally, ladies of easy virtue or slave girls.

And, of course, no Christian girl is allowed to have her feet bound.
[Illustration: ON A BALCONY IN WESTERN CHINA.] Leaving Ping-shan-pa with a stiff breeze in our favour we slowly stemmed the current.

Look at the current side, and you would think we were doing eight knots an hour or more, but look at the shore side, close to which we kept to escape as far as possible from the current, and you saw how gradually we felt our way along.
At a double row of mat sheds filled with huge coils of bamboo rope of all thicknesses, my laoban went ashore to purchase a towline; he took with him 1000 cash (about two shillings), and returned with a coil 100 yards in length and 600 cash of change.

The rope he brought was made of plaited bamboo, was as thick as the middle finger, and as tough as whalebone.
The country was more open and terraced everywhere into gardens.