The morning mists gather into a thin vapour and roll upwards, showing miles of fields, cultivated like kitchen gardens, interspersed with mud villages, where the houses are made of wattles plastered over with the earth they stand on, with chimneys formed of a cone of mud, and paper windows. In wet weather and floods these houses often partially dissolve, or subside altogether. But then they are so easily rebuilt. Here the urchins come out and revel in the murky wash in our wake, whilst the sampan propellers push hurriedly off from the bank, lest we land them, as indeed we did one, high and dry after our swell had subsided. Hundreds of coolies are trudging along, with their bamboo poles slung across their shoulders, whilst others squatted on the ground occupied with that B.C., or ancient Eastern method of irrigation, the automatically worked water-wheel.
We now have the disagreeable excitement of going aground, a gentle bump on a flat bank, where we stick fast, and recall all the stories which we have been hearing, of steamers staying aground for a week or ten days. Meanwhile the screw churns away at the liquid mud, and a crowd collects on the causeway above, and yet we remain fast. It is after half an hour's manœuvring that we get off and proceed through the few more perilous bends still left, with a few more hair-breadth escapes. We see the tall chimneys, covering a large area, of the Arsenal, and then the Pagoda, with its white umbrellas, overlooking the fort and military exercise ground for the troops, and then we are nearing Tientsin. It is pleasant in the first view of Tientsin to be greeted by a familiar remembrance of England, in the towers of a miniature Windsor Castle, the Victoria Hall of the English Settlement, that tower above the dust-coloured hovels. It is in strange contrast to the two cages on the banks, fixed on the top of tall bamboo poles, where are seen the heads of two criminals. Doubtless they were executed on the spot where the crime was committed, as is the Chinese custom.
We anchor in the river, and amid a deafening roar, and the shoving, scraping and pushing of hundreds of filthy sampans, we land on the Bund of Tientsin, and are settling into the somewhat uninviting quarters of the Astor House, when Mr. Byron Brennan, H. M.'s Consul, kindly sends for us, and in an hour we are installed in luxury, and have washed away the unpleasant reminiscences of our journey across the Yellow Sea in a collier.