As it was not advisable for the steamer to reach Canton before sunrise, she stopped about ten o'clock and remained at anchor until daybreak, when she again was got under way. An hour later Rob was wakened from a troubled dream of fighting, killing, and burning by such a confusion of yells, splashings, and other strange sounds that he rushed out on deck with the idea that his dream had become a reality. Once in the open he gazed upon a scene unique and unparalleled. The steamer was slowly making her way against the swift current of a turbid river, along the water-front of the most marvellous city in all the world. She was moving amid a vast collection of floating craft, from fine, English-built Chinese war-ships and foreign gun-boats down through junks of all sizes, stern-wheel "kick-boats" propelled by man-power, gorgeous mandarin-boats gay with fluttering flags, house-boats, flower-boats--which are floating palaces in which men of wealth give expensive dinners--silk-boats, rice-boats, and produce-barges from up-river; fishing-boats, duck-boats, long, slender--paddling-canoes known as snake-boats, besides thousands of sampans and slipper-boats, that ply for hire in any capacity, and on which half a million of people are born, live, and die, in many cases without ever setting foot on land.
So poor are these sampan dwellers, and so greatly is the supply of their labor in excess of the demand for it, that they struggle with one another for the chance of making even a single "cash," which is valued at one-tenth of a penny. In the present instance scores of sampans, propelled by sweeps or sculling-oars, were racing towards the _Fatshan_, their occupants screaming, gesticulating, firing off crackers, and beating gongs to attract the attention of her passengers. All these craft looked exactly alike, and were about twenty-five feet long by eight feet wide. Each had a small, open deck forward, on which a man, standing and facing the bow, rowed with a pair of sweeps. There was an arch-roofed house amidships, and aft of it a covered deck occupied by a woman, who worked a long sculling-oar, by means of which she both steered and propelled the light craft. Not one of these boats was painted, but all were colored alike with pungent smelling Ning-Po varnish.