ethereal sweetness. And so it might have been had the rain abated--a
curious accompaniment to a moonlight night. Down it came, straight and
determined and businesslike, in the windless silence, dancing like a
shower of diamonds of purest brilliance on the background of the placid
waters.

Very beautiful, reader, for a time. But would that the rain had been all
moonshine!

Glorious was it to revel in for a time. But, during the weary night
watches, in a bed long since soaked through, and one's safest
nightclothes now the stolid Burberry, with face protected by a
twelve-cent umbrella, even one's curry and rice saturated to sap with
the constant drip, and everything around one rendered cold and
uncomfortable enough through a perforation in its slenderest part of the
worn-out bamboo matting--ah, it was then, _then_ that one would have
foregone with alacrity the dreams of the nomadic life of the _wu-pan_.

Our introduction, therefore, to the great Gorges of the Upper
Yangtze--to China what the Niagara Falls are to America--was not
remarkable for its placidity, albeit taken with as much complacency as
the occasion allowed.

I do not, however, intend to weary or to entertain the reader, as may
be, by a long description of the Yangtze gorges. Time and time again
have they fallen to the imaginative pens of travelers--mostly bad or
indifferent descriptions, few good; none better, perhaps, than Mrs.
Bishop's. But at best they are imaginative--they lack reality. It has
been said that the world of imagination is the world of eternity, and as
of eternity, so of the Gorges--they cannot be adequately described. As I