KNOW some men-old stagers mostly, dicted to their little comforts and prerring warm weather to cold - who sider that the spring snipe-shooting is the best sport of the year. For myself, I hold no such sweeping opinion ; all sport is good, all seasons have their merits, and in their changes and differences lie much of the charm that calls each restless Nimrod to his wanderings. No doubt, on a bitter winter's iilght, when the stove is working badly and the thought of undressing as a prelude to cold sheets makes your teeth chatter, or when yulohing in a damp dingey against wind and rain after duck that are always just out of range, it is in human nature to think longingly of rapefields shimmering in the sun ; of leisurely tramps through sweet-scented fields of bean, where the fat birds rise from their feeding with a lazy squawk ; of warm nights on the houseboat deck under the new moon of May. But then, again, when the May-day sun has shone more fiercely than you expected, when all the available moisture in your system has perspired from you into a mud-swamp, or when the first hungry mosquitoes of the year drive you untimely from the deck to bed, shall you not then take comfort in the thought of bright frosty mornings to come ?
There is, as the wise man has said, a time for pheasants and a time for snipe, a time to be hot and a time to be cold ; but for mutable man, brief joy-seeking atom, is it not well that memory softens past evils, while Hope glorifies the days to come in disparagement of the present ? Else had half the world made shipwreck of its courage.
Nevertheless. if comparisons must be made, there is something to be said in praise of spring snipe-shooting. Imprimis, it combines the ardours of a revival with the joys of a lottery ; then it is springtime-springtime when the heyday sings in the blood (ay, even in the blood of Bank managers) a song of half-forgotten dreams. Every creek is sweet with the breath of hawthorn and eglantine ; from the shimmering haze of the level distances comes a murmur of familiar sounds that remains for ever in the mind blended with the scent of the rape-fields ; clicking of buffalo-wheels, rippling water purring in the paddy runnels, song of thrush from the bamboo grove ; expostulating creak of yulohs that cut the jadewater as their boats glide past us in the bright sunlight ; and everywhere, like an undertone motif of industry, " the murmur of innumerable bees."
The spring snipe makes his appearance in the regions around Shanghai with the regularity of a Canadian Pacific captain. Scheduled, by the unwritten laws of their destiny. to cross the continent of Asia, from south to north, each spring, seeking the marshy uplands of Mongolia and Saghallen for their breeding-grounds, these vast armies of birds, travelling by night, feeding and resting by day, make their unvarying pilgrimage with an unbroken front, covering many hundreds of miles. Betweeti the 2oth and the 25th of April any night-watcher of the skies may hear their first line of skirmishers shrilly calling overhead ; by the middle of May the rearguard has passed on, and only rare stragglers remain. A wonderful thing this migration of birds, wherein Rome's augurs found signs and portents, wherein lies awesome speculation enough for any reverend man to-day. Whence grew the law that leads this snipe to make his little life an unbroken summer, that sends him northwards and south with waning and waxing suns ? What xons of transmitted memories have taught these birds to travel at fixed dates and by invariable routes ? In its regularity and vast distances the migration of the Asiatic snipe seems to me more wonderful than that of our swallows, over which miracle White of Selborne cogitated to so little purpose.
Not the least remarkable thing about the spring snipe is, that. for all his long night-journeyings, he contrives by rich feeding and sunny siestas to keep extremely fat, so that even the amateur sportsman perceives that this is not that Scolopax gallinago, aimless wanderer, and common snipe, with whose razor-like breastbone we have been unpleasantly familiar all winter. The fatness of the spring snipe is indeed a joy to housewives, associated in the mind of epicures with mangoes and the succulent samli of this season. So fat is he that one wonders how, in such portliness, he wings his way to the northern breedinggrounds, and whether such unromantic embon ,Aoint is fitting for birds on their way to courtship and domestic bliss.
The flight reaches the Yangtsze Delta, as I have said, about the 20th of April, but from Wuhu, where the river dips south, the snipe are sent to the markets a week or ten days earlier. With the advent of the first pintailed birds, many houseboats that have lain idle since Chinese New Year put off from their moorings, scattering over the inland waters, from Lokopan and Four Waters to Hsitai Lake and Soochow, and Nimrod trudges through regions of trefoil, low grass, rape-seed, and bean in blissful expectancy of the good brown birds' sudden rising from the wet furrows. There is a man of my acquaintance-Brandon, to wit, a man of more than average veracity-who annually asserts that he has found spring snipe (Gallinago stenura and Gallinago megala) a week or more before ordinary mortals have heard its familiar squawk. Doubtless there are spots that attract eccentric and adventurous birds, and from a truthful man, who knows the difference between the I4-tail feathers of Scolopax and the 26 or 20 of the pintails, I accept these statements meekly. Nevertheless, I would not advise you to tramp the furrows, except for the fun of the thing, or the chance of winter birds, before the 2oth of April.
But in the first week of May, what time half the population of Shanghai goes temporarily mad, abandoning its business for four days to watch the race-course performances of Mongolian rats, then any man with ordinary luck should find the spring snipe in their accustomed feeding-grounds. These vary to a certain extent, of course, according to wind, weather, and the height of the water in river and lakes.; but whatever the conditions, each year's flight seems to have inherited the accumulated memories, and to have learned the landmarks of its predecessors. This to me. who could not possibly remember how and where I fed on any last year's pilgrimage, is marvellous indeed; but any observing man will confirm it, that to certain spots these birds come, year after year, from the far-distant south with the precision and regularity of a timetable. In August, when they pass southwards again, their habits, modified no doubt by the responsibilities of domestic life, are less dignified and leisurely no longer (small blame to them) are they conspicuously fat they stay with us but a little while, appear erratic and restless, and go swirling about (especially towards evening) in sudden wisps and most unexpected places-no doubt the effect of large and ,,undisciplined families.
There is a peculiar charm about these May-day outings -the charm of fragrance and colour spread broadcast under cloudless skies, of lotus-eating noontides, leisurely siestas and bathing in willow-shaded pools, so that shooting becomes an incident, rather than the sole object, of the day. There is something in the air, even before sunrise-a suggestion of silent travail in all these fertile fields, wherein you seem to hear the growth and stir of all their myriad lives. Amongst the reeds the white mist rises slowly, like incense, from the river-banks, and the bright yellow of the rape glistens through unbroken veils of gossamer. One has to admit the innate savagery of man, to explain his desire to slay food, with noise of gunpowder, under such conditions. Thus one meditates, full of intelligent sympathy with the vegetarian movement, until the first bird rises ; then certain unphilosophic muscles bring the gun automatically to your shoulder, and you proceed to shoot, without further analysis of the brutality of mail, until the sun is nearly overhead. It is clean shooting, and one can get ri id of a hundred cartridges in a good morning's work ; nevertheless, it lacks, for my taste, the chances and changes, that quality of unexpectedness, which one should look for in sport.
There are other objections to spring shooting. In the first place you and the dogs have to walk through ripening crops, and although you do no great harm to the rape, heavy boots play havoc with the young wheat and beans. Good sportsmen will stick to the furrows. but at times you must cross them, to the hurt of the lord of the soil. Then there are flies, which seem to gravitate instinctively towards a houseboat from the four quarters of heaven-flies and mosquitoes and winged beasts that flop into your soup, or the tresses of Nexra's hair, creatures that buzz and bite from sheer gladness of heart. That flies are inseparable from the ointment of all earthly joys I know, but I can call to mind more than one sultry excursion when the ointment has been completely lost to sight beneath their legion wings. One particular excursion I remember well, for it nearly ended in a catastrophe. It was on the Hearis Desire, Wilden's boat. one blazing afternoon in May under the walls of Soochow, and all the flies from a beggar's camp had come aboard. Wilden, a man of resource, has invented a device most effective in catching flies on the ceiling ; it consists of an ordinary tumbler with half an inch of whisky in it. This, held directly under the fly, so disturbs his mind that he falls straightway into the whisky, to die a drunkard's death. Well, Wilden had cleared the ceiling of flies after dinner with a view to- a restful morning, and half a tumblerful of them bore testimony to his ingenious device; but, alas, that tumbler was left on the table, and Wilden, awaking thirstily before dawn, mistook it for his unfinished whisky and soda. I draw a veil on that horrid scene.
Then there is the heat-and when the wind is in the west it can be unpleasantly hot in May. Brandon will tell you that he prefers the hottest day to the discomforts of winter, to getting into bed, or out of it, in the cold, or putting on half-frozen boots. Quot homines, tot sententie: there may be many to agree with him ; but one may defy cold with oil-stoves, blankets. and hot grog, while against heat there is no remedy save the ice-box, which generally fails you in the hour of need. And then the bag, those savoury birds to encompass whose death we have come so far., how many times has a sultry day's swift process of decay made useless slaughter of it all ? Happily, this need no longer happen, for with the coming of the railway each day's bag can be saved from thus vainly perishing, and decently fulfil its destiny, between the fish and the roast, for omnivorous man.
With the coming of the railway between Shanghai and Nanking (it has come since I began this interminable book) things have greatly changed on the river. Places that were accessible only to the lordly taipan and the fortnight's leave man are now invaded by the week-end tripper, ay, even by the Portuguese clerk ; you may now see more guns than pheasants in the Pen-yu Creek ; from Chinkiang as a base all the barrier country lies open. Already the gentry of Quinsan have petitioned that the gun-bearing foreigner may be restrained from further invasion of that once peaceful region : from the Chinese point of view the nuisance is undeniable, and 'twill lead, no doubt, to passports, licenses. and all manner of horrid regulations., taken from the best Japanese models. In a country like this, without gamelaws or protection of any kind, the railway that gives native trappers access to distant markets, and brings guns in a few hours to regions hitherto unaccessible under a week's trip, must put an end to all game in its vicinitybut, thank Heaven, the man who looks for unbeaten paths and solitudes can still find them, and this railway-building fever that has at last overtaken our Celestial friends will help him to do so.
The Foreign Settlement at Shanghai has been called, not without reason, the best missionary in China, and you may see its results to-day in the cheap but cheering imitations of its civic administration in Peking, Canton, and many of the great cities ; nevertheless, the railway is a better. For if China is to find herself, if she is to put her house in order, to protect for herself that sovereignty and territorial integrity which our international agreements so glibly guarantee for the time being, two things are essential : firstly, the people, the " stupid people," as the literary expression runs, must be educated to the point of insisting on reform of the ``````````````````system of government, which leaves their country at the mercy of aggression ; and, secondly, the reformed Government must be relieved of its peril of bankruptcy, because bankruptcy means the united action of creditors who, so long as the debtor is solvent, work each for himself. And railways (Chinese railways, unconnected with foreign politics) will do more towards these ends than any other for education. The Mandarin of the old school knows this, and for years he has successfully headed off the " fire carriage," denouncing it as a destroyer of men's homes and ancestral sepulchres, working on the people as Demetrius stirred up the Ephesians, and with the same laudable motives. But the people are not so stupid as literary traditions would make them, and a eew object lessons, taught in the face of every official obstruction, ha@ done their work. Most of the provinces know now that they want railways just as they want education and the abolition of opium, and, when the people want anything in China, the Government is wise enough to know that they won't be happy till they get it. It is in this formation of public opinion on rational lines that lies China's hope of escaping political extinction.
Your Chinese trader is a traveller by instinct ; railways to him mean new fields for barter,' interchange of produce between districts that have stewed, commercially speaking, in their own juice since the beginning of time. They mean outlets for surplus labour, markets for surplus produce; they mean post-offices, newspapers, and the voice of the great world beyond. For gentry and local officials they mean opportunities in construction and management, perquisites and patronage. Therefore, though their organisation in Chinese hands is at present chaotic and rudimentary, the idea of railways is popular ; every train that carries its load of traders and workers from one city to another is doing the work that is most needed, developing new channels of communication, helping to the exchange of knowledge and ideas, from whence must come reforms.
As far as the development of trade is concerned, or increase of China's producing power by reason of railways, the sanguine predictions of the wise men and Chambers of Commerce were justified, no doubt, by general experience, but they are falsified by Chinese fiscal and administrative methods. As long as the lekin system lasts, every new railway will afford new opportunities for the rapacities of the Mandarin ; the lekin system will last, under one name or another, despite pious opinions and treaties, so long as Imperial revenue and the monstrous cost of its collection depend chiefly upon taxation of trade. And this indirect taxation) which simply follows the line of least resistance, will continue so long as the Central Government remains, as at present, without effective organisation and authority to collect direct taxation, that is to say, until the whole body politic is reformed upon economic principles. To-day the air is full of projects of reform, schemes for Constitutional Government, a new Navy, Law revision, and a Budget ; but they revolve, like the Socialist movement.of Europe, in a iration. For, vicious circle, without constructive insp to arrive at reorganised taxation, without which these schemes are foredoomed, elective authority is essential, and this cannot be established without a reorganised civil service and efficient police, which requires new sources of revenue. and, in the meanwhile. defenceless trade, goods in transit by boat, railway, or cart, continues to be taxed to the extreme limit of its endurance. Herein, again, the ultimate remedy lies in the education of public opinion, but for the moment the lekin system is more firmly established than it was lgen six years ago, when the Chinese Government and Sir James Mackay made arrangements (on paper) for its abolition.
You will perceive, long-suffering friends (unless you have wisely skipped this chapter), that from the subject of spring-snipe we have come perilously near to the discussion of serious matters. The transition, via the railway, was easy, but some of you may consider the trick unjustifiable, remembering the promises I have made you. To be quite frank, I could not resist the impulse, for there has been so much twaddle written by quite prominent persons about China and its Government that a few sensible remarks seemed timely and harmless. Let it pass at that.
To return to the railway. I was at Nanking recently, shooting snipe with the genial Irishman who is building a local line for the Viceroy, from the riverside terminus to His Excellency's Yamen, and there I met one of those excellent, thirty-year-in-the-country, sinological persons, whose business it is to teach the Oriental idea how to shoot, and whose views on Chinese affairs are eagerly sought (and reproduced as original) by travelling M.P.'s. I congratulated this worthy man on the completion of the line and on the impending construction of the hotel, progress which links up Nanking with Shanghai and civilisation, by enabling Cook's tourists to do the place comfortably in forty-eight hours. His reply was curious, opening up a new point of view and illustrating the broadening effect of outport life. Yes, he said,"it's all very well, and no doubt it will do good. But it has its drawbacks for us who live here. Hitherto. you see, our morning paper has come from Shanghai by steamer, and I am accustomed to finding it on next morning's breakfast table. Now it reaches us in the evening, and I cannot say that I like to read a morning paper at night." Resisting the flippant suggestion that he should put it under his pillow unread, or bribe the postoffice to hold it till morning, I sympathised with him heartily, realising at the same time how little we can guess at the far-reaching complex results of our well-meant attempts to amend the established order of things.
But if, because of the railway's disturbance of one of his minor habits, this professionally reasonable man conceives a grievance, what must be the pent-up feelings of all that swarm of river-folk whose means of livelihood are dislocated, and perhaps destroyed, by this earth-shaking invention of the foreign devil ? All the Soochow launches, stern wheelers, and passenger junks whose business dwindles day by day as the native traveller realises the advantages of speed and comfort ; all the riverside inns and petty traders that lived on the water-borne traffic. Happily 'tis a patient philosophic people, living as a rule from hand to mouth, and therefore not averse to new ventures. The South Gate's loss should be the North Gate's gain ; besides which (for reasons which you will find in serious works) vested interests in China, excepting those of the Man with the Button, are only locally articulate at best. Therefore it is that under the heaviest dispensations of the Chinaman's Providence, to wit famine, flood, wars and rebellions, they will die stoically in thousands, accusing or attacking no man, inarticulate in the face of the irremediable purposes of destiny. And no doubt they include railways in this category.
Nevertheless, injure these patient philosophic people in a matter where their customs or sense of justice expects redress, and you will find them as excitable and unreasonable as any peasantry in the world. An illustration of this occurred recently, when a young man, the son of a farmer near Chinkiang, was killed by a slow goods train running to Nanking. Following the custom popular in the north he had gone to sleep on the line, the rails affording a fair substitute for the Chinese idea of a pillow ; but he had made his bed at a curve, so that the engine was upon him before the driver knew it. The train was stopped and the body taken to the nearest farm-house. Thereupon followed the usual scenes of loud lamentation. accompanying demands for compensation by the family. When such scenes occur after any shooting accident up country, if you do not know the language and " talk reason," the crowd usually seizes a hostage, dog, gun, or even a boat, pending a settlement ; in this case they simply put the corpse back on the line and camped around it, beldames screaming on the embankments while their men sat stolidly on the rails demanding five thousand dollars. An hour later the mail train came up, lined up behind the corpse, and joined in the discussion ; then another local from Chinkiang. By this time two villages had joined in the argument, which ended only after a detachment of troops had cleared the line. In discriminating between the act of God and the work of man, and determining his attitude in each case, the Oriental is often as obstinately illogical as any Scotsman.
But for all the coming of the railway, there will always be life and movement of boats on the Soochow Creek. It will not share the fate of the Peiho, whose ancient junk traffic passed with the building of the line to Peking. For the Soochow Creek (as the Grand Canal is here known to us) is the main artery of water-borne transport and trade converging from all points from the Great Lake, from the rice regions of Anhui, the silk and paper districts of Chekiang, from countless towns and villages on inland waters remote from the railway. There will always be sails gliding silently amongst those green fields, white sails and brown and blue, gleaming in the sunlight into the farthest distances, fewer than to-day, no doubt, but plenty of them still. There is little or no current on the canal, so that carriers work with equal profit coming and going, making boat freights for the commoner and durable kind of mer- chandise lower than anything a railway could offer ; and all the wandering petty traders and craftsmen that people these pleasant backwaters, the cormorant men and a dozen other fishing tribes, the shell-gatherers, the pedlars and beggars, these care nothing for your newfangled methods of locomotion. For them, and for their picturesque apologies for homes, has been the freedom of these creeks since the beginning of time, and here they will be until Celestial socialism suppresses vagrancy and enforces a " minimum Wage."
There is something typically Chinese, and something of irony, in the fact that much trade would naturally forsake the river-freight in market stuffs and fish, silk cocoons, tribute rice and other perishable cargo-but for the subtlety of those very lekin barriers and squeezing stations which the railway was expected to wipe out of existence. The modus operandi of the Ickin spider who sits at the centre of the great web that stretches over the waterways of three provinces is delightfully simple, of that type of audacious simplicity that marks the best efforts of our Rockefellers and Harrimans. Magnificently ignoring the Central Government's interests and obligations, regardless of everything beyond the purview of his own blood-sucking business, he calmly decrees, treatise and conventions notwithstanding, that a rate of lekin should be levied on the railway four or five times higher than that collected on the river. Of course there are powers behind this lekin spider, powers of Buttoned men concerned in the launch trade, of vested interests in high places ; nevertheless, it is typical of the country and its unchanging ways, that despite sendings of Imperial Commissioners (lavishly entertained at Gargantuan feasts), petitions of merchants, protests by Chambers of Commerce, and denunciations by the Press, one man's fiat should thus be able to defy all the King's horses and all the King's men, compelling the trade of three provinces to follow his impious will for the better collection of arbitrary and illegal levies. The spider has no armed forces ; nothing to help him in this plundering of the community but " olo custom," yamen lobbying, and the long-suffering of a class incapable of col-lective resistance.It is the knowledge of these things that leads the plain man to wonder by whom, and how, the decrees of China's impending Parliament shall be enforced.

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