II

GRAVE LANDS OF CHINA





The launch had returned the passengers to the steamer at 11:30; the
captain was on the bridge; prompt to the minute at the call "Hoist
away" the signal went below and the Yamaguchi's whistle filled the
harbor and over-flowed the hills. The cable wound in, and at twelve,
noon, we were leaving Nagasaki, now a city of 153,000 and the
western doorway of a nation of fifty-one millions of people but of
little importance before the sixteenth century when it became the
chief mart of Portuguese trade. We were to pass the Koreans on our
right and enter the portals of a third nation of four hundred
millions. We had left a country which had added eighty-five millions
to its population in one hundred years and which still has twenty
acres for each man, woman and child, to pass through one which has
but one and a half acres per capita, and were going to another whose
allotment of acres, good and bad, is less than 2.4. We had gone from
practices by which three generations had exhausted strong virgin
fields, and were coming to others still fertile after thirty
centuries of cropping. On January 30th we crossed the head waters of