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Updated: May 3, 2025
And one bright June day, in 1901, when the green mountainsides, the blue rivers, and the waving rice-fields of Formosa lay smiling in the sun, Kai Bok-su heard once more that call that had brought him so far from home. Once more he obeyed, and he opened his eyes on a new glory greater than any of which he had ever dreamed. The task had been a hard one.
Here is a peasant who comes back after the winter to prepare his field for cultivation. The man's horizon of ideas, like his vocabulary, is very limited. His view of actual life is bounded by a few rice-fields, a range of hills, and the village near by. Possibly one visit to a city or large town has enriched his experience.
Could not such escaped slaves find at least a partial supply of food in the rice-fields about Savannah, and cotton plantations on the coast? I merely throw out these suggestions. I know that such a course would be approved by the Government, and I believe that a manifestation on your part of a desire to bring the slaves within our lines will do much to silence your opponents.
Somewhere near at hand a water-wheel, slowly irrigating the rice-fields, creaked and groaned after the manner of water-wheels all over Africa. In all there was that subtle sense of unreality that utter lack of permanency which touches the heart of the white exile in tropic lands, and lets life slip away without allowing the reality of it to be felt.
He talked of art, its methods, its principles, its duties to the age, the people, the civilization; the large moral uses, which kindled Charmian's fancy, and made Cornelia laugh when Charmian proposed a scheme for the relief and refinement of the poor on the East Side, by frescoing the outsides of the tenement houses in Mott Street and Mulberry Bend, with subjects recalling the home life of the dwellers there: rice-fields and tea-plantations for the Chinese, and views of Etna and Vesuvius and their native shores for the Sicilians and Neapolitans, with perhaps religious histories.
There too came the characteristic military remedy: "The islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice-fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. John's River, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of Negroes now made free by act of war." So read the celebrated "Field-order Number Fifteen."
At four o'clock P. M. the extensive marshes of Jehossee Island were reached, and I approached the village of the plantation through a short canal. Out of the rice-fields of rich, black alluvium rose an area of higher land, upon which were situated the mansion and village of Governor Aiken, where he, in 1830, commenced his duties as rice-planter.
One day we turned off from the high road, and took a path apparently but little used, as it was a complete carpet of short green turf, which led us across a gently undulating champaign country; passing now through patches of beautiful forest, now through open rice-fields or small plains of alang-alang.
The latter, while living usually on fruit and often making havoc in the sugar-cane plantations and rice-fields of the natives, also eats birds and their eggs, small mammals and reptiles, and is said to devour large animals when found dead, though it does not attempt to kill them for food. The young gorilla which was kept in captivity at Berlin became quite omnivorous in its diet.
He had been standing then on the deck of his steam-launch gazing beyond the river, with its crowding, outlandish junks, beyond the towns and villages huddled along the banks, beyond walls gay with wistaria, beyond green rice-fields stretching into the horizon, to where a flaming sunset covered half the sky a sunset which itself seemed hostile, mysterious, alien, Mongolian.
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