360 SILK DISTRICTS. [Cuar. XIX. 
not only plant, graft, and cultivate the mulberry, 
but also gather the leaves, feed the silkworms, 
and wind the silk off the cocoons. 
During my progress through the silk district, L 
visited a great number of cottages, where the 
worms were feeding. They are commonly kept in 
dark rooms, fitted up with shelves placed one 
above another, from the ground to the roof of the 
house. The worms are kept and fed in round 
bamboo sieves, placed upon these shelves, so that 
any one of the sieves may be taken out and ex- 
amined at pleasure. The poor natives were greatly 
surprised when they saw a foreigner coming 
amongst them, and generally supposed that I in- 
tended to rob them of their silkworms. In all 
the villages which I visited, they uniformly denied 
that they had any feeding-rooms—although the 
leaves and stems of the mulberry about their doors 
told a different tale; and they never failed to di- 
rect me to go on to some other part of the country, 
where they assured me I should find them. Before 
we parted, however, they generally gained confi- 
dence, and showed me their collections of worms, 
as well as their mode of managing them. 
After passing through the Hang-chow silk dis- 
trict, and keeping on in an easterly direction, we 
reached, late in the evening, a large town named 
SUNG-KIANG-F00, which is about 30 miles to the 
west of Shanghae, and stopped for the night under 
its ramparts. By daybreak the next morning we 
were again on our road, and reached Shanghae on 
