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The hills above Phete are bare or thinly forested and every available inch of level ground is under cultivation with corn and a few rice paddys near the creek; the latter were a great surprise, for we had not expected to find rice so far north. The village itself was exceedingly picturesque but never have we met people of such utter and hopeless stupidity as its inhabitants.
The little cottage in which the Paddys lived, you will remember, was on the far side of the common. Behind it ran an alley where all sorts of people lived, negroes, beggars, tramps, all of them poor and some of them desperate. Peggy's cottage was at one end of the row, and the convent wall was built up close to the side of it, leaving a space just wide enough for one person to squeeze through.
In the center of the single room, on a large flat stone, a small fire always burned, but much of the cooking was done on the porch where a tiny pavilion had been erected over the hearth. The Shans at Nam-ka had "no visible means of support." The extensive rice paddys indicated that in the past there had been considerable cultivation but the fields were weed-grown and abandoned.
These animals come to the rice paddys, which fill every valley, to hunt for frogs and fish, but it is difficult to catch them because of the Chinese who are continually at work in the fields. We spent a week trapping about Yen-ping and although we caught a good many animals they were almost always stolen together with the traps. We had this same difficulty in Yün-nan as well as in Fukien.
None of us had ever seen natives in any part of the world who were such unmitigated thieves as the Chinese of these two provinces. The small mammals are hardly more abundant than the larger ones for the natives wage an unceasing war on those about the rice paddys and have exterminated nearly all but a few widely distributed forms. A few days after our arrival in Yen-ping we went with Mr.
When Paddy was there bending over his ash heaps she didn't care, for every little while he would look up from his work, and wave his hand, and that was all she wanted. Things got very desperate with the Paddys. Money became so scarce that they couldn't buy coal, but had to use half-burned cinders from the common instead.
Wherever a stream comes down from the mountain-side or can be diverted by irrigating ditches, the ground is beautifully terraced for rice paddys, but in other places, corn and peas appear to be the principal crops.
While we all know that Paddys are common enough in cities, still there wasn't a turnpike for this one to be on within five miles of Jefferson Square. Although the children were afraid of the old man, they could not help teasing him whenever they got a chance. It seemed reckless and brave to shout out something and then take to their heels.
Mile after mile this fertile plain stretches away in a succession of rice paddys and fields of sugar cane interspersed with patches of graceful bamboo, their summits drooping like enormous clusters of ostrich plumes; the air is warm and fragrant and the change from the surrounding hills is delightful.
Two canoes, each dug out of a single log, and tightly bound together, formed the ferry, but the packs were soon across the muddy stream and the mules were made to swim to the other bank. Shortly after leaving the ferry we emerged from the vast stretches of rank grass on to the open rice paddys which stretched away in a gently undulating plain from the river to the mountains.