The trade in salted and sun-dried fish is extensive and finds its way all over the kingdom; an overland traffic of considerable importance exists with the capital. Strings or stacks of dried fish are to be seen in every village. Pack ponies, and coolies laden with loads of dried fish, are met upon every road in the kingdom. The pedestrian who "humps his own swag" almost always carries a small stock with him. The parallel industry to the business of curing fish is the operation of making salt from sea-water, a pursuit which is conducted in a manner equally rough and casual. In both of these industries there is a crying need for simple technical instruction, as well as for capital, the lack of which hinders the work from achieving any particular success. There is so much fish in the sea along the coast, that, if the catches were properly treated, the beginning of a prosperous export trade could be readily laid. At the present only a bare sufficiency is secured, the days of prosperity not yet having begun to dawn. The industry is completely paralysed by the exactions of the officials; the fishermen, like the peasants, knowing only too well that an immunity from the demands of the Yamen is found only in a condition of extreme poverty.
Many fishing villages were passed through in the journey from the Diamond Mountains. Each seemed to reflect the other, the sole difference between them lying in their size, the number of fishing-boats drawn up on the beach, the strength and density of their smells. The poverty and squalor of these hamlets was astonishing. The people seemed without spirit, content to live an idle, slatternly existence in sleeping, yawning, and eating by turns. Despite offers of payment, it was impossible to secure their services in a day's fishing, although they generally admitted that the
