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Otago Daily Times, Issue 16289, 23 January 1915, Page 10

— A friend of mine (says a writer in the Daily Chronicle) lias just returned to town from a remote part of China, where he has been laying a railway. He tells me the big difficulty was the graves of Chinamen, over which, of course, no railway is supposed to run. At the outset it looked as if his line, in avoiding these, would become "straighter than a corkscrew, but not so straight as a rainbow." Then he conceived the notion of buying up grave 6 that lay on the coming lino of route. The wily Chinese were equal to him, for they dug up the bones <pf their ancestors and planted them ahead, right in the. line of advance. My friend fears that often ho paid three times for the same old bones; but ultimately he completed the railway, which now runs in a fairly straight line, (accept for the first mile or two.