Harry Alverson Franck

The day was delightful, fleckless and summery as if it had been three months later, and we should willingly have lingered longer among the cypress-sighing shades of Mencius, had it not been beyond the power of man to shake off the influx of childish soldiers, street urchins of all ages, and every inquisitive male of Tsowhsien who caught sight of us in time, that had burst through the opened gate and swirled about us like molten scoriÆ wherever we moved. My companion, I have neglected to mention, was a robust American missionary with headquarters away down in the southern corner of Shantung, who was kind enough to initiate me into the devout sport of “itinerating.” From the home of Mencius we were to strike out across country by wheelbarrow. To the man who, before the present century began, had already grown to recognize that as his chief means of locomotion, there was far less thrill in the thought of wheelbarrowing than there would have been in the unusual experience of taking a street-car; but to me it was something entirely new in the field of travel. The passenger wheelbarrows of Shantung are of two kinds,—small and large, city and country, short or long distance, according to the individual choice of dividing line. In town they are merely two cushioned, straight-backed benches on either side of the high wooden wheel, on which six or eight crippled women may ride comfortably, sitting sidewise. But for cross-country work a larger, sturdier breed is used, with room for several hundredweight of baggage and a pair of the owners thereof stretched out upon it, feet forward, like a sultan on his divan. In town one man usually bears the whole burden; out in the country there must be at least another tugging at a rope ahead—unless one be wealthy enough to replace him with a donkey or an ox—besides the fellow gasping between the back handles, with the woven strap between them over his shoulders. For a very long trip, say twenty to thirty miles in a day, it is considered more humane, or at least more certain, to have a third man between the front shafts or handles which the country variety possesses.

Making two Chinese elders of a Shantung village over into Presbyterians

In the good old days, only a few years ago, in fact, the usual wages for a barrow-man in rural Shantung were five cents a day—and he saved money on that. Now things have reached a pretty pass, for each man may expect as much as thirty cents, though actually to demand that would almost rank him among the profiteers, the radicals, the undesirable element of the working-classes, and to pitch one’s demands too high in China is likely apt to result in losing one’s job to the three hundred and sixty-five other men who are eagerly waiting to snatch it. To be sure, these wages are not so dreadful as they seem, for they are in “Mex,” and nowadays the use of the wheelbarrow is included.

Perhaps it was because we generously paid this highest price that our two men bowled along as rapidly as a “Peking cart,” and many times more smoothly, so evenly in spite of the broken foot-path along the pretense of a road we followed that one could read as easily as on any train. But their best possible speed seems to be a characteristic of most of the barrow-men of Shantung, as does a constant cheerfulness that is always breaking out in broad smiles or laughter at the slightest provocation, as if their joy at having another chance to exercise their magnificent calling could not be contained. Unless the passenger is so inexperienced and squeamish that the gasping of his human draft-animal just behind him prickles his conscience, the wheelbarrow of the country variety comes close to being China’s most comfortable form of land travel. It has little of the cruel bumping and vicious jolting of a two-wheeled cart; there is far less labor involved in reclining on an improvised divan than in bestriding an animal; even a rubber-tired rickshaw is given to sudden protests at the inequalities of the surface of China. Besides, two rickshaws can rarely travel side by side, whereas the men stretched out on either flank of a barrow-wheel may discuss religion, philosophy, and the natural equality of man without once straining the ears or losing a word. One might go further and praise the exclusiveness, the sense of Cleopatran luxury, the freedom of route which makes the barrow so much preferable to a train packed with undisciplined soldiers and as many of the common, ticket-buying variety of unbathed Celestials as can crowd into the space these putative defenders of the country graciously leave unoccupied. The train makes more speed, perhaps; but what is so out of keeping with the spirit of China as haste? The minor circumstance that there must be mutual agreement between the two passengers on a wheelbarrow as to when to ride and when to walk might conceivably be a disadvantage, but there is no reason it should be if the one more given to walking will bear in mind the plumpness of his companion and its proper preservation. From the distance of the Western world the impression may arise that the barrow-men must consider these fellows, whom they wheel about like the latest pair of twins, rather weak and sorry members of the human family. But this is merely another way of saying that the Occidental can quickly lose his way in the labyrinth of the Chinese mind. The reaction of the sweating coolies seemed to be, not, “I wish this overfed pair of loafers would get off and walk a while,” but a kind of pride at being associated with men of such wealth and standing, mingled with the feeling, built up through many generations, that naturally persons of finer clay should not bemean themselves by tramping like a coolie, and topped off with the impression that if the gentlemen call a halt and take to their feet it is because the wheeling is not entirely satisfactory, which quickly brings in its train the dread that one of those three hundred and sixty-five other men eagerly waiting for such a job will get it next time.

We passed two of the “telegraph” towers of old-time China that afternoon, square-cut stone and mud structures large as a two-story house, from the now crumbling and grass-grown tops of which news and orders were sent from end to end of the Middle Kingdom. Fires were the signals by night and a dense black column of smoke from burning wolf’s dung by day. Particularly were they used when more troops were needed at the capital, and the story runs that one emperor who flashed forth the call for a general mobilization just because his favorite concubine wished to see the discomfiture on the faces of the exasperated soldiers shortly afterward found his rÔle in the hands of one of the eager understudies. Cues are still no abnormality in China as a whole, but one is struck by their almost universal retention in Shantung. The Manchus, it is said, ordered cues to be worn not so much because they had worn them for centuries themselves as in order to be able to tell a man from a woman, if some of their rather effeminate new subjects chose to disguise themselves, for both sexes had long hair up to that time. It seems that when orders were given, after the overthrow of the Ch’ing dynasty, that this badge of Manchu servitude be removed, the execution depended largely upon the provincial and local authorities. In some places men were given the choice between losing their pigtails or their heads, and they had less difficulty in deciding upon the relative value of these two adornments than might have been the case had the question been left to an impartial committee. But the military ruler of Shantung during the first years of the republic was a monarchist who had no use for this new republican stuff, and who did what he could to return the emperor to the throne; therefore the people under him dared in few cases to remove what amounted to a badge of loyalty. Now that a decade has passed and the making of hair-nets has become one of the principal industries of the province, when even the boy “emperor” in Peking has adopted the Western hair-cut, one would think that the masculine braid would disappear. But personal beauty is a matter of taste, and the Chinese mind is famous for the number of cogs in that section of it devoted to the preserving of established customs—as China goes, the wearing of a cue can scarcely be called an old one—and on the subject of barbering the country seems at present to be about at a status quo.

It was the sixteenth day of the first moon, our March 3, the last big holiday of the Chinese New Year’s season. Thus, though we had seen endless streams of people, the men as nearly spotless as they would ever be during this Year of the Pig, the women in their gayest garments, which in most cases meant blue or red silk jackets above bright red trousers tapering down to tiny white baby-shoes, ears and glossy oiled hair adorned with their most precious trinkets, the children dolled up like the principal actors in a Chinese drama—though, I say, we had seen many thousand of these pouring into Tenghsien for one of the chief celebrations of the year, there were no people whatever working in the fields, which this far south were quite ready for the first spring tilling. Besides, much of the land in this region is given over to winter wheat, planted in October and now just beginning to tinge with green the vast yellowish brown of the typical North China landscape. When at length we had been wheeled, like a load of bricks, to the gateway of Chung-Hsin-Tien, we paused and dismounted, for it is a gross breach of Chinese etiquette to ride into or through a town where you have friends—or to speak from a vehicle or the back of an animal to a friend on foot. A remnant of this point of view, members of the A.E.F. will recall, survives in American army regulations.

“Middle-Heart-Inn” was for centuries a place of great importance, being the half-way stopping-place of all travel on the old Peking-to-Shanghai route. Then the railroad came, a decade ago, passing it by without even naming a station in its honor, and it sank to the large miserable village within a long, rambling, broken mud wall which we found it. Moreover, it had been struck by hail the autumn before and the crops just outside its wall had suffered more severely than anywhere else in the devastated area. One was in luck, I gathered, not to have been caught out in that storm without an umbrella. The country people of all that region solemnly assert that the hailstones were as large as tea-pots, and American missionaries bravely run the risk of being charged with perjury by asserting that they saw with their own eyes some as big as grape-fruit. One of the stork-heron birds from the compound of Mencius was struck dead, and several severe injuries to people were reported.

My companion still had left a few hundred dollars from what had been given him for distribution among famine sufferers, and our first act after installing ourselves in the mud hut that served as a mission station and partaking of the heavy repast which a few of the faithful had insisted on providing—and on clashing chop-sticks with us over—was to set out on a visiting tour among those pointed out by the chief local Christians as in urgent need of assistance. I was struck with the thoroughness with which my companion prepared for the coming distribution. He refused to give any aid whatever to cases which he could not personally inspect, and he had lived in China long enough to know most of the tricks of the unworthy. Anywhere in the United States, not even excluding the “poor white” and negro communities of the South, the entire population of Chung-Hsin-Tien would have seemed at a glance to need the assistance of charity. But in China one must be ragged and dirty and possessionless and hungry-looking indeed to stand out visibly from the millions always more or less in the same predicament. Hut after hut we entered to find not a Mexican dollar’s worth of anything within it. A bit of crumpled straw or a few rags of what had once been cotton-padded garments served in most cases as bed, sometimes on a small k’ang that could be heated—had there been anything to heat it with—more often on the earth floor itself. Then there might be from two to half a dozen mud-ware jars and shallow baskets in which the family habitually kept its possessions, and possibly one or two peasant’s tools. That was all, in sight at least; and the people had had no warning that a benefactor was coming. It seemed to be taken for granted that my companion would consider every one a deceptive rascal until he had personally proved himself to the contrary, and not only were there no protests against our entering every hovel, but invitations to do so, in spite of the breach in Chinese domestic customs involved.

We felt into every jar and basket, prodded into every corner and nest of rags, to make sure that the family did not have more than the handful of grain they admitted. In no case, I believe, was any deception discovered, but my conscientious companion not only continued until darkness fell that Saturday evening, but violated his religious scruples by spending much of the Sabbath afternoon at the same task. Sometimes it was an old man living alone, with literally nothing but a few handfuls of chaff and the hulls of beans to feed upon. More often there was a wife and several children to share such splendid provisions. Not a few lived in yin-tse instead of huts,—holes cut in the ground and roofed over with sticks, straw, and mud, with a crude ladder or notched pole by which we descended through a small opening to the dark interior. The missionary was particularly scrupulous in entering all of these, for they often serve as the rendezvous of gamblers, and he trusted to his experienced eyes to make fairly sure that a cave was not this, but actually a poor man’s dwelling. There was a similar hole in the ground, though uncovered and with earth steps leading down to it, in the yard of the local “mission,” for in the winter it is more comfortable to hold school or gossip in such a place, out of reach of the wind, yet in the sunshine, than in the dreary, unheated mud huts.

Sometimes only the woman and the children were at home, and the only decent way to inquire of her about her husband, according to Chinese etiquette, was to refer to him indirectly as her wai-tou or nan-ren, her “outside” or her “male person.” Perhaps he had gone to Manchuria, with the millions of coolies who set out for there soon after the Chinese New Year, their belongings in a soiled quilt roll. Compared with densely populated Shantung, where ten villages within five square miles is nothing unusual, the “Eastern Three Provinces” are sparsely peopled and wages are correspondingly high. From Chefoo to Dairen the poorest steamers cross in a day, and the railroads offer reduced rates to migrating coolies—furnishing them open freight-cars for their journeys. But there is more snow than work in Manchuria during the winter; moreover, any Chinese with a proper respect for his ancestors will return to his home among their graves at least for the beginning of the new year, so that much time and some wages are lost in traveling to and fro. Sometimes the “outside” was working in another part of the province. There is, of course, no slavery in China; so long-civilized a land would not tolerate such an institution. But many of the “gentry” and landowners of Shantung, and of other provinces, no doubt, profit by the excess of population by paying a man five “Mex” dollars a year and his food for his labor, and making no provision whatever for his family.

But there was no real famine in Chung-Hsin-Tien, my companion concluded. No one was actually starving—though how some of them kept from doing so on their visible means of support was beyond me. Under-nourishment was common; the only plentiful thing in town was children, especially boys, perhaps because of the custom of even the poorest of keeping the girls out of sight. For nature seems to take revenge on the Chinese for their ardent desire for male offspring. How often the traveler who has the audacity to pursue his questions far enough—for Chinese friends do not greet one another with inquiries as to the health of their respective families—will finally unearth the shamefaced answer, “All girls.” Some had sold their land—a mou, or about the sixth of an acre, at fourteen dollars “Mex” perhaps—to carry them over the winter, some their last household goods that would bring a copper; one man who was so far above the lower level as to have no hope of outside assistance answered my joking query as to the price of the most likable of his small sons with a quick, “Take him along!” But none had been reduced to the final necessity of tearing down their miserable houses in order to sell the few sticks of wood in them; hence there were deserving, but not urgent, cases.

The native helper had filled a huge sheet of red paper with the names and particulars of each family visited, to the dictation of my companion, who divided them into first-, second-, and third-class cases. The first were the most needy—the utterly possessionless, they would have seemed to Americans at home—who would be given “full assistance,” that is, a “Mex” dollar or two a month per person until the next harvest began to come in. Second class were those who still had something left—a few pounds of corn meal, a chair that might be sold, a job at a few coppers a day—and they would be helped accordingly. To be inscribed third was proof of comparative affluence; it meant that the family had a goat or a pig, perhaps even a donkey; that one of their jars was still half full of corn or millet or kaoliang, or that they had been caught in the act of smoking tobacco or of having a little handful of the weed in the house, prima facie evidence that they were really not suffering from hunger. To these, small distributions would be made if there was anything left over from the more needy cases. The two impressions, aside from the definition of the word “poverty” in China, which this canvassing left with me were, first, the unfailing cheerfulness, the hair-trigger smile and ready laughter, of even the most miserably destitute, and their tenacious clinging to custom in spite of misfortunes. It seemed never to have suggested itself to the poorest family in town that it might be well to limit the number of children it brought into the world to share its perpetual nothing; and mothers who did not have a pot or a whole garment to their names still somehow found cloths with which to bind their daughters’ feet. From their point of view of course this last effort was genuine parental sacrifice; for to leave the girl with whole feet would mean almost certain starvation without a husband instead of only partial starvation with one.

Itinerating missionaries in China can scarcely avoid living up to the biblical injunction to “suffer little children to come unto” them. For their first appearance at the edge of town is the signal for a flocking from all directions, not merely of all the boys and as many of the girls as are not restrained, but of a generous collection of men of all ages, and even some of the boldest women. Chinese and Western courtesy are diametrically opposed in some of their characteristics, and perhaps there is no wider gulf between them than the conception of proper behavior toward strangers. We consider it rude to stare; the Chinese consider it almost an insult not to stare. Like the young ladies of Spanish America, who would take it as much more than a slight on their beauty not to be ogled so brazenly that it becomes almost indecency by the young men lined up on either side of their promenade, so the Chinese high official or man of wealth would be seriously hurt by a failure of the populace to flock about him wherever he appears in public. Simple villagers cannot of course be expected to know that Westerners do not consider this attention so essential, and to that is added the most inquisitive temperament among the races of mankind, a curiosity which, though it is no exaggeration to dub it monkey-like, is probably proof of a higher grade of intelligence than that of more stolid and indifferent peoples. But it is a form of intelligence with which most travelers from the West, I believe, would very willingly dispense, for to be stared at unbrokenly hour after hour by a motionless throng becomes at times the most exasperating of experiences.

It is not of course to the advantage of a missionary to drive off the crowds that gather about him, for he has come to China mainly for the purpose of addressing crowds, and every tendency toward exclusiveness is so much set-back in his chosen work. Naturally, too, it is not fitting in the guest of an itinerating missionary to throw cups of tea or mud bricks in the faces of the compact mob through which may be scattered some of his host’s converts, however strong the temptation may become. During all our stay in Chung-Hsin-Tien, therefore, we were like kings at a levÉe—if we are to believe that kings were ever so thickly attended during the exchanging of their nighties for their breeches. There was a gate to the mission yard, and a padlock that fitted it; but the picking of that even from the outside seemed to be the easiest thing the town did. Besides, the yard was invaded so closely on our heels that nothing would have been gained by locking the gate. The door of the mud house that usually served as church, as well as for the sleeping-room of the local pastor and ourselves, was no barrier to the advance. Long before the preliminary tea was poured for us there was a compact wall of humanity drawn so tightly about us that we could barely move our elbows, and the sea of fixedly staring faces stretched away to infinity out through the yard. Now and then an undercurrent of discontent at inequality of proximity surged through the multitude, to break against our ribs or toss smaller urchins in between our legs and over our knees. When at length it came time to open our cots and sleeping-bags, there was still a large audience to such disrobing as we cared to do under such conditions, and it was an hour or two afterward before the most privileged characters had been convinced that they, too, should retire. Nor were we by any means out of bed next morning when there appeared the vanguard of the throng that was to wall us in all that day. It was hard somehow to understand just why a town which often saw foreigners still came to stand by the hour watching with the fixed eyes of a statue our every slightest movement, be it only the tying of a shoe-lace or the buttoning of a coat.

A large number of those about us bore famous names. Many a Chinese village is made up almost exclusively of persons having the same surname and the same ancestors, and Chung-Hsin-Tien, being no great distance from the birthplace of either, contains many descendants of both Confucius and Mencius. There was Meng the shopkeeper and Kung the cook, both Christians, right within the mission compound, and it was easy to find in any small crowd others bearing those illustrious names. Once I came upon a Mencius squatting in the dirt at the corner nearest the gate, shoveling away with worn chop-sticks a cracked bowlful of some uninviting food, and so ignorant that he fled in dismay when I suggested a photograph, refusing to have his soul thus taken from him. A little farther up the street a Confucius sold peanuts in little heaps at a copper each. Missionaries in this region say that those bearing the two famous names are so numerous that the difficulty of making converts is increased, because they are so proud of their ancestry that they will seldom risk the stigma attached to changing to a “foreign” faith. Yet there was a Confucius from this very town who was now a Presbyterian preacher, and the two names appear rather frequently on the church registers of southern Shantung.

Of late years at least it is not unduly easy to become an accepted Christian there. My companion spent half that Sunday morning in putting a dozen candidates through a long catechism, and permitted only two of them to join the church at once, baptizing them—from a tea-cup—at the morning service. It was fully as easy, too, to get out of the church as to get into it; one of the hardest and most important tasks of the missionaries is to see that backsliders are dropped from membership. Almost before we had entered the hole in the mud wall that passed for a city gate a rather addle-pated old man had appeared, hugging his well-worn Bible under his arm; and as long as we remained he hovered close about us, grinning at us upon the slightest provocation, as if to say, “We are brethren, far above this common herd.” He was about the first convert in the region—and one of the chief thorns in the flesh of the itinerator. For the latter had been forced to drop him from the church rolls years before because he had taken a concubine, and there was still no prospect of his being granted forgiveness, even though he had advanced the ingenious argument that he had been compelled to the act by his mother, lest the family graveyards be left without attendants. Yet he continued his church-going as religiously as if he were one of the principal deacons. Perhaps it was just retribution that he still had no son, in spite of his lapse from the tight missionary way. I confess that I did not quite follow the reasoning which made it quite all right to admit the concubine herself to church membership, but I have always been dense on theological niceties.

The day was delightful, and services were held out in the yard. Perhaps twoscore men and half as many women, not to mention a veritable flock of children, crowded together on the narrow little benches taken from the mud-hut church, or stood behind them. I could not but admire the endurance of the missionary, and silently congratulate him on the sturdiness inherited from his “Pennsylvania Dutch” ancestors. For it can scarcely be a mere mental relaxation to talk incessantly, earnestly, and energetically for an hour in a tongue as foreign as the southern Shantung dialect, while Chinese urchins by the dozen, from seatless-trousered infancy to devilish early youth, seemed to be doing their utmost to make life about them unbearable; and when even the adults frequently displayed habits that are not usual in our own church gatherings. Or, if this is not enough to try any man’s strength and patience, there was the frequent torture of listening to the horrible imitation of our hymns perpetrated, with missionary connivance, by the congregation. Evidently no Chinese can “hold” a tune, but he can do almost anything else to it which a vivid imagination can picture. Why their own “music” cannot be adapted to religious purposes to better advantage is one of those innumerable questions which flock about the traveler in China like mosquitos in a swamp.

Evening services of almost as strenuous a nature, and many personal conferences on religious or financial matters, plumply filled out the day, and early next morning, when the last clinging convert had been shaken off without the suggestion of violence that would have planted a little nucleus of discontent in the community, we were away again by wheelbarrow. I am in no position to testify as to how strictly the few Christians of Chung-Hsin-Tien lived up to their faith in every-day life, but they, and no small number of their as unwashed and ragged fellow-townsmen, missed mighty little of the vaudeville performance which the appearance of a foreigner or two in almost any Chinese town seems to be considered by the inhabitants. This time we had three barrow-men, one of them a first-class candidate for famine relief funds, whose insistent smile at this unexpected windfall of a job was less surprising than the mulish endurance he somehow got out of a chaff and bean-hull diet. Less brute strength is required, however, in the handling of a Chinese wheelbarrow than appearances suggest. During the afternoon I changed places for a bit with the coolie between the front handles, and while I would not care to adopt barrowing as a profession while some less confining source of livelihood remains to me, the thing ran, on the level at least, more like a perambulator than the most optimistic could have imagined. The Chinese are adepts in the art of balancing, and the wheelbarrow, like the rickshaw and the “Peking cart,” is so adjusted as to call for less exertion than the sight of it suggests. Ups and downs, sand or soft earth, sheer edges of “road,” and the passing of many similar vehicles where there is no room to pass, however, make an all-day journey no mere excursion even to a team of three barrow-men.

Women and children were scratching about here and there in the fields; the men were bringing manure in two big baskets fixed on a barrow, such as carry the night-soil of Peking out through the city gates, and were piling it in little mounds differing from the myriad graves only in size. The New Year season was visibly over, and the incessant working-days had come again. Somehow the name “Shantung” had always called up the picture of a half-wild region, in spite of the protests of reason; I found it instead very thoroughly tamed, as befits one of the most populous regions on the globe—tamed at least in the agricultural sense. When it came to such afflictions as bandits, officials, and the Yellow River there is still much taming to be done in the province of Confucius.

We passed almost incessantly through villages. High on the tops of the smooth, bare hills that grew up as we advanced were rings of what seemed to be stone, refuges built at the time of the Taiping Rebellion, which came to a standstill in this very region. They were only walls, with perhaps still a well inside, though the suspicion was growing that bandits were finding a new use for them. Once we passed close on the left an isolated stony peak that is as sacred as Tai-Shan, though much less famous. Thousands of country people climb it, especially in the New Year season, either as their only penance excursion, or as a part of their pilgrimage through all the holy land of China. It is a rough and uninviting climb, but nowhere is filial devotion more generously rewarded, if we are to believe the faithful. Therefore one may on almost any day see the son of an ailing father, dressed only in his Chinese trousers, holding his hands with palms together in front of him, a stick of burning incense between them, marching to the top of the mountain without once taking his eyes off the rising thread of smoke before him. A crowd follows close behind, and one of these carries the clothing of the devotee, whose father is certain to recover under this treatment—unless one of several hundred little incidents occur to make the penance useless.

That night, in the mission-owned mud hut of another unlaundered town, my companion preached a long sermon full of energy to a congregation of five, one of whom was part-witted, two often asleep, and another merely one of our barrow-men. Only the village “doctor,” whose training consisted of a year as coolie in a mission hospital, kept his attention strictly on the business in hand, as should be expected of the chief, even though somewhat fragile, pillar of Christendom in the region. There had been an audience of goodly size for such a locality in the early part of the evening. Not only was the hut crowded with the score it would hold, but at least twice as many more blocked the open door or flattened their noses against the single dirty window. But a few rifle-shots had suddenly sounded somewhere off toward the hills. Bandits had raided, looted, and kidnapped in this town several times during the year just over; and though there was no sudden exodus—for the Chinese must “save face” under all circumstances—the audience melted steadily away until only the five remained. The itinerating missionary, however, must never let outside influences affect even the tone of the message he is ever seeking to deliver. Whatever his benefits to the field he is cultivating—and a wide experience is needed to acquire any certain knowledge on this subject—he at least still has some of the hardships of early missionary days, which his thousands of well housed colleagues, even in China, only know by hearsay.

Tenghsien seemed to be far enough south to be tinged with the problems and customs of southern China. Its dialect was audibly at variance with that of Peking, even to an ear of slight Chinese training. On the wall of the vault-like passage through the southern city gate hung several time-blackened wooden crates containing the shoes of former magistrates. It is one of the politenesses of the region to stop a departing magistrate at the gate and remove his footwear, as a way of saying, “We hate so badly to see you leave that we will do everything within our power to prevent your going.” How careful such an official may be to make sure that the ceremony is not omitted in his case, even though he has to detail the shoe-pilferers, or whether or not he slips on the oldest footwear in his possession that morning, are of course unauthorized peeps behind the scenery such as tend to take all the poetry out of life. We dropped in at the local pawnshop, with which my host was on good terms rather out of policy than necessity, but it was nothing now but a huge compound of empty buildings, crowded together in almost labyrinthian turmoil. The pawnshop is one of the most important institutions in any Chinese community, with many curious little idiosyncrasies unknown to our own displayers of the golden balls, but it can scarcely be expected to continue to function where, between grasping officials and bandits frequently sweeping in from the hills, neither the ticketed articles nor the cash on hand can be kept from disappearing.

The throwing out of sick babies seemed to be a fixed habit in Tenghsien, though one seldom hears of such cases farther north. Millions of Chinese parents believe that if a child dies before the age of six or seven it is because it was really no child at all, but only an evil spirit masquerading as one; and unless it is gotten rid of in time, woe betide the other children of the family, already born or to come. It is preferable apparently that it be eaten by dogs, but above all it must not die in the house. The missionaries of Tenghsien have grown to take this custom as a matter of course. If in their movements about town they came upon a discarded baby still alive, they did what they could to relieve its sufferings, but they did not “register” surprise. The Chinese merely passed by on the farther side of the street. To touch an abandoned child would be to invite the evil spirit to your own house, unless it proved, by getting well, to be merely a sick child, and no Chinese is brave enough to run any such risk as that. Not long before my arrival, the mission “Bible woman” had found a girl of two thrown out on a pile of filth, and even she had dared do nothing more than sit and fan the flies off it, until it died. The missionaries, however, have come to be looked upon as immune from these evil spirits. More than one garbage-heap baby graces the mission kindergarten, and a man of some standing now in the town carries on his face the teeth-marks of the dog to which he was abandoned. It is not all mere superstition either, the missionaries assert, but dread of responsibility, hatred of initiative, often mere selfishness, masquerading as such. Many Chinese may actually fear that the river spirit will get them if they save a drowning person, but many others are merely afraid of wetting their clothes.

The Western and the Chinese mind may be similar in construction, but they certainly do not work alike. Let the missionaries take a girl for a year’s training, for instance, or for the temporary relief of her parents, and they are sure to be informed when the period is over that it is their duty to care for her the rest of her life. As it is contrary to the Chinese idea of politeness to mind one’s own business, so their gratitude seems to be of a different brand from ours. Something akin to that feeling is no doubt now and then felt, in otherwise unoccupied moments, for the men and women from overseas who spend their lives trying to instil into Chinese youth such wisdom and right living as they themselves possess; yet rarely does the passing visitor get a hint of anything more than superficial politeness toward the benefactors, and the assumption that they are somehow making a fine thing, financially or materially, out of their labors—otherwise why would they continue them?

Sometimes Tenghsien buries its children, like those of its paupers who do not belong to the beggars’ gild, in such shallow, careless graves that the dogs habitually dig them up again. These surly brutes sat licking their chops here and there on the outskirts of town, among discolored rags of what had once been cotton-padded clothing scattered about little mussed-up holes in the ground. Lepers were treated with a similar policy of abandonment, or “let the foreigners do something about it if they must.” The same American woman who had the highest record for rescuing babies from the garbage-heap had built the only leper-home in Shantung, if not in northwest China, a mile or two outside Tenghsien. As far as the Chinese are concerned lepers run about the country as freely as any one else. They may not be exactly popular—for the people know the horrors of the disease and easily recognize its symptoms—but they can scarcely be avoided. The thirty or more men and boys, who had been gathered together in a two-story brick building many times more splendid than the homes any of them had known before, had that same cheerful, seldom complaining, easily smiling demeanor of the Chinese coolie under any misfortune. Only a few were bedridden, for the greater resistance to disease for which the Chinese are famous seems to spare them some of the more horrible ravages of leprosy. But on one point they were losing their cheery patience. For months they had submitted weekly to injections of chaulmugra oil without any visible signs of improvement. The treatment is painful; they all admitted it, and one fat-faced boy of fourteen was pointed out as “tearing the walls apart with his screams” when it was administered to him. But his quick retort to the charge seemed to be the consensus of opinion: “Oh, please let us live without the needle and go to heaven in peace when our time comes!” Such efforts were being made to build a similar refuge for women—who of course always come second in China—that even the men sufferers were asked to contribute the few coppers they could live without—and when it is finally built, through missionary effort, it will pay taxes to the local authorities, like many other mission institutions.

Under more auspicious circumstances I should have struck off into that labyrinth of mountains occupying the southeastern part of Shantung. But it might have meant a very much longer stay than I cared to make. For years now the mountainous parts of the province have been overrun more or less continuously by what we call bandits. The Chinese call them “hung-hu-tze” (“red beards,” a term evidently originating in Manchuria, where bearded men from the north seem to have been the first raiders, and to have suggested a clever disguise for native rascals) or “tu-fei” (which means something like “local badness coming out of the ground”). But under any name they are a thorn in the side of their fellow-men. In Peking, where the so-called Central Government still decorates foreign passports with separate visÉs for each province, five at a time, even though the provincial authorities rarely look at them, conditions were admitted with a frankness which other Governments might copy to advantage. I had been given permission to travel freely in Shantung—“except in the areas of Tungchowfu, Linchengchow, Tsaochowfu, Yenchowfu, and the regions controlled by the Kiao Taoyin.” In other words, one could go anywhere, so long as one kept within sprinting distance of the two railway lines. As a matter of fact, much of the information of the Central Government was out of date; places it excepted were now peaceful, and others it did not mention were infested with brigands. Yenchowfu, for instance, showed no more ominous signs when I passed through it than any other sleepy old walled town; and the world at large knows how safe the railways themselves were just about this season. Had there been any good reason to run the risk, the chances are that I could have gone anywhere in Shantung without anything serious happening to me; on the other hand, I might have been carried off before I got well into the foot-hills.

The mountainous sections in which the brigands were operating most freely are merely poorer, less populous parts of the crowded province, where there is little to be seen except smaller editions of what may be found within easier reach elsewhere. Now and then they had entered Tenghsien, the station of my “itinerating” companion; only recently they had posted a warning on the mission gate in Yihsien, reached by a branch-line a little farther south, that unless some large sum of cash was forthcoming within a hundred days the place would be burned. The women and children had been sent to safer stations, and outposts of agricultural and evangelistic work had been temporarily abandoned. It was near Lincheng, the very junction of the Yihsien line, and the next large town south of Tenghsien, that a score of foreign passengers were to be taken from the most important express in China a few weeks later and carried off into these same hills. The brigands, in fact, hard pressed for a way out of their difficulties, debated the wisdom of taking the missionaries of Tenghsien and neighboring stations as the lever they needed against the authorities. It is more in keeping with justice that they finally decided to hold up the express instead and be sure of hostages with wealth and influence enough to assure the world’s taking notice of them, for the missionaries have lived for years in constant danger of such a raid, while most of the passengers were well fed individuals who had left home mainly in quest of experience.

When Tenghsien came to be altogether too closely pressed by bandits, the authorities fell back upon a scheme to drive them away without bloodshed. The Boxers, it will be recalled, had their origin in southern Shantung, and the method by which they fancied they made themselves immune to injury by their foes is still widely believed there. The authorities therefore, or private individuals with the initiative needed, called in some countrymen with stout faith in the efficacy of this form of protection and paid magicians two dollars each to make them “immune.” This is accomplished by various forms of hocus-pocus, in which the swallowing of bits of paper with certain characters written on them, and the wearing of similar charms, are the chief features. Not only did the countrymen believe that this made them proof against bullets, swords, and bayonets, but, what made the investment really useful, the brigands also believe it. When care had been taken to have word of the ceremonies reach the bandit camps, the “immune” persons were placed in front of the government troops, who moved slowly but steadily out into the hills. The outlaws knew the futility of wasting precious ammunition on men whom it would be impossible to injure; hence they gracefully retreated as far from town as the authorities chose to drive them. There was, of course, the slight danger that some skeptic among the bandits would doubt the efficacy of the charm. But the Chinese are much more given to swallowing their popular beliefs whole than to investigating their worth, and in the case of an unforeseen accident the evidence would be plain, not that the hocus-pocus is ineffectual, but that it was badly performed.

Not far below Tenghsien the railway crosses the old bed of the Yellow River, that greatest of Chinese vagrants. As far back as history is recorded this has changed its mind every few centuries and decided to go somewhere else. It is not a believer in the old adage that as you make your bed so you should lie in it, for the Hoang Ho has the custom, not usual even among rivers, of piling up its course until it flows some twenty feet above the surrounding country, puny mankind meanwhile striving feverishly to confine it by dikes which cannot in the end keep pace with the growth of silt between them. No Chinese can be expected to be comfortable on so elevated a bed, much less a river, and when things become altogether too unbearable the Hoang Ho suddenly abandons its course and makes a new one overnight. The last great change of this kind was in the middle of the past century, when, swinging on a pivot near Kaifeng, one of China’s many old-time capitals, it struck northeastward across Shantung to the gulf of Chihli, though it had formerly emptied into the Yellow Sea hundreds of miles farther south, barely touching Shantung at all. Shantung did not want it, but it had no choice in the matter. The provinces which had been so suddenly relieved of so violent an enemy, and at the same time presented with a large strip of land where land is so badly needed, certainly were not going to help, nor even permit, if it could be avoided, restoration to the old bed. Besides, there are both historical and visible evidences that Shantung had harbored the unwelcome visitor more than once before, that the two mountainous parts of the province were probably once islands, and that the Yellow River, washing back and forth between them, has built up the level and more fertile parts of the country. Similar things happened in many parts of the world, but in most cases the job was finished before man appeared, whereas in China it is still going on. The result is that man finds himself very much in the way during the process.

On the way home I changed places with one of our three wheelbarrow coolies, and found that the contrivance did not run so hard as I might otherwise have believed