the production of compost to enrich the soil.

Caskets may be placed directly upon the surface of a field, encased
in brick vaults with tile roofs, forming such clusters as was seen
on the bank of the Grand Canal in Chekiang province, represented in
the lower section of Fig. 26, or they may stand singly in the midst
of a garden, as in the upper section of the same figure; in a rice
paddy entirely surrounded by water parts of the year, and indeed in
almost any unexpected place. In Shanghai in 1898, 2,763 exposed
coffined corpses were removed outside the International Settlement
or buried by the authorities.

Further north, in the Shantung province, where the dry season is
more prolonged and where a severe drought had made grass short, the
grave lands had become nearly naked soil, as seen in Fig. 27 where a
Shantung farmer had just dug a temporary well to irrigate his little
field of barley. Within the range of the camera, as held to take
this view, more than forty grave mounds besides the seven near by,
are near enough to be fixed on the negative and be discernible under
a glass, indicating what extensive areas of land, in the aggregate,
are given over to graves.

Still further north, in Chihli, a like story is told in, if
possible, more emphatic manner and fully vouched for in the next
illustration, Fig. 28, which shows a typical family group, to be
observed in so many places between Taku and Tientsin and beyond
toward Peking. As we entered the mouth of the Pei-ho for Tientsin,
far away to the vanishing horizon there stretched an almost naked
plain except for the vast numbers of these "graves of the fathers",
so strange, so naked, so regular in form and so numerous that more