Birds. 



8197 



The fields are now dry ; rice, padi-birds and frogs are gone ; not 

 even a land-crab sidles along the muddy banks. All around the yel- 

 low blossoms and snowy pods of the cotton are mingled with the 

 foxglove-flowers of Sesamum, from the seeds of which an oil is ex- 

 pressed ; wheat and barley form undulating fields, together with 

 purple tares and sweet-scented flowering beans. A granite arch, 

 dedicated to filial virtue, often rears its quaint form above the cotton, 

 and everywhere wooden coffins are seen exposed in the open air ; the 

 grassy grave-mounds are yellow with Chrysanthemum Chinense, 

 from which you note the sibilant song of the grasshopper-lark ; the 

 pheasant crows in the young corn, and the pretty ring dove flies across 

 the path to join her mate in the bamboo thicket. 



The banks are covered with violets and dandelions, mixed with 

 patches of yellow Thaumatopsis, and, what is rare in these southern 

 latitudes, with the blue flowers of a little gentian. 



In this scene of smiling plenty the people are calmly industrious, 

 tending their goats, weeding the crops, or threshing out the last year's 

 padi ; the women are busy among the cotton plants ; the men are 

 turning the sod and crushing the clods with their heavy four-pronged 

 hoes, and the children are gathering esculent leaves. 



On what, however, is he intent who, basket on arm, surveys the 

 willows with inquiring eye ? By means of a little sickle at the end of 

 a long bamboo, he ever and anon detaches brown swinging cradles 

 from the slender boughs, and deposits them in his basket. This is a 

 pupa gatherer, and those tiny mummy-like objects of his solicitude are 

 the pupa-cases of a species of Oiketicus. When I blandly desire to 

 know the use these accumulated larvae are to be put to, the face of the 

 old man relaxes into a smile, and he transforms himself suddenly into 

 a duck, gobbling up imaginary Oiketicus larvae with impatient greedi- 

 ness and noise. 



This is one way in which they fatten ducks in China, but there are 

 several others. In the beginning of summer, when the Principia 

 utilis, which in winter time is nothing but a tangled mass of green 

 thorns, teems with milk-white flowers and swarms with bees ; when 

 the edges of the narrow paths are gay with the white and pink coro- 

 nals of Anlhyllis, about which wasps are vigilant and bustling ; when 

 in all waste places the blue flowers of Veronica mingle with the milk- 

 white stars of Stellaria, and in the far distance a puce-coloured mass 

 of peach-blossoms contrasts with the green willows; when those long- 

 beaked hairy flies, the Bombylii, hover over the hot narrow paths, like 

 so many liliputian humming birds, and yellow-legged bees settle on the 



