In connection with this volume I have several words of thanks to write.

My first and best thanks are due to the editors of the Pall Mall Gazette and of the Pall Mall Budget. Their kindness has enabled me to reprint here several articles that have previously appeared in one or both of their papers. And to the generosity of the editor of the Pall Mall Budget I owe five of the illustrations appearing here.

“Oriental Nuptials” have appeared in The Lady, the editor of which paper kindly allows me to here use them.

Messrs. Bourne and Shepherd of Calcutta have generously granted me permission to reproduce three of their copyrighted photographs.

Messrs. Skeen of Colombo have kindly permitted me to use two of their copyrighted views of Ceylon.

Several of the Burmese photographs have been collected for me in Burmah, and sent me by William Miller, Esq., of Rangoon. I am peculiarly obliged to Mr. Miller, because he found time in the press of grave official duties to take so much trouble for one who had not then the pleasure of his acquaintance.

L. J. M.

      spring up, bloom, bear, and wither

In the same hour.

The quiet, respectful, ready Oriental service was delightful. And it was adequate, which Eastern service is not always, for it was under efficient European supervision.

The verandah of the hotel was a great cool place. It was pleasant to sit there when the heat of the day had broken a bit—to sit there and write chits for iced lemon drinks or claret cup, and watch the deft Indian jugglers, and barter with the persistent natives for lace and embroideries, for silks and pongÉes, for silver belts and for gems. Two Mahommedans had the privilege of spreading their wares on one end of the verandah. And the others were allowed to come upon the verandah with a small quantity of things. They were not allowed to over-pester you, which made shopping on the hotel verandah far pleasanter than shopping in the shops.

But the hotel, pleasant as it was, was merely a European incident,—it was no part of Colombo the native, Colombo the picturesque, though some of the native colour and bits of the native picture were necessarily included in its background.

The first thing we did in Colombo, after we had had a rest and interviewed a dhobie, was to inspect the theatre. The second was to take a long drive.

We drove some distance, indeed, to the theatre. We drove by the barracks, and the bagpipes of the Gordon Highlanders squeaked out that the Campbells were coming. We drove by native shops, where tiger skins from the thick jungles and rich rugs from Persia were hung outside, and where delicately wrought gold and silver ware gleamed in the windows. The proprietors of these shops invariably rushed out and threw themselves in front of our steed, who was, by the way, far from fiery. The gharri wallah and the sais gave us no help. They sat and waited developments as patiently as did the horse itself. We tried abusing the over-solicitous merchants. But they were impervious to abuse. We found that there was one way and one way only of effecting our escape, namely, by committing perjury. We took their cards and vowed we would return in one hour, to their particular shop and to none other.

And so we, at last, escaped—escaped into a native street. Shall I ever forget it! Hut huddled against hut, where the streets were thick with dwellings. In the front of almost every hut was a booth—a booth piled with grains or fruits or any of a hundred other articles of diet, all equally unknown to us. Potatoes and bananas were the only things I recognised. Oh yes! and pumpkins. In each booth sat a salesman or woman. Sometimes it was a nearly naked coolie—as often it was a carefully dressed Cingalese woman. In every instance there was a pair of primitive scales, and, usually, a customer or two. Farther out, the streets grew more sylvan. There were more cocoanut trees and fewer houses. There were no more shops. Here and there a native squatted upon the ground, waiting to sell a trayful of violently coloured cakes and sweetmeats, or drinks from greasy-looking bottles that were filled with crudely-hued liquids.

We passed a thousand-stemmed banyan tree. A pretty Tamul mother sat in its shade nursing a rolly-poly black baby. A few feet from her were two yellow-clad priests of Buddha, telling their beads.

We drove by a quiet, irregular, silver lake. We drove through a tangle of tropical undergrowth and Eastern flowers. Here and there the cocoanut trees lifted their supreme heads, and now and again the laughing faces of brown babies peeped out at us from the thick of the bamboo.

We came to the theatre all too soon, for our delight with this old world, so new to us, had quite superseded our professional anxiety. But the theatre was a pleasant surprise.

It was pretty—decidedly pretty, and new. We opened it, if I remember—at least professionally. The auditorium was a large high room, beautifully finished with teak-wood. I sat down while my husband gave some directions about scenery. At least fifty coolies were working in their slow, noisy way. They ought to have worked more quickly, for they were encumbered by an absolute minimum of clothing.

We went back to the gharri. We drove through some pretty, unkept gardens, where the air reminded me of my grandmother’s best cupboard, it was so heavy with the smell of cinnamon and nutmegs, and of cloves. That is one of the disadvantages of having lived in the West. Such vulgar utilitarian comparisons suggest themselves.

Children ran after us, throwing flowers and fruit into my lap and screaming to my husband for bukshish. It was amusing at first; but it grew wearying. If they had varied it a bit, by offering him a flower or begging from me a pice. But that never occurred to them. It is a very sophisticated Cingalese indeed who ever suspects a woman of having any money. The late gloaming fell upon us, and we could no longer see the full details of the beauty that surrounded us. As the last of the colour faded with which the sunset echoed the beauty of Ceylon, we found ourselves at the door of a Buddhist temple. As my husband lifted me out of the gharri, I noticed that he was softly quoting a lovely line from The Light of Asia. He was interrupted by a sudden rush of humanity. Three buxom girls had dashed from an adjacent hut. They threw themselves literally upon him, with a nice Oriental disregard of my presence. My husband shook himself, but not free, and used a word that is not in the purists’ lexicon. I must own I felt a little perturbed. Andrew (my husband’s Cingalese boy, of whom more anon) relieved the embarrassment. “No harm, sahib—no harm,” he said. “Hers want bukshish.”

The Buddhist temple was novel, and weird in the dim light. The grotesque figures of Buddha were huge, crudely shaped, glaringly coloured, and shockingly disproportioned. But the priest who constituted himself our cicerone was very wonderful. He spoke only fairish English. But he explained Buddhism so clearly, so concisely, and withal so picturesquely, that we felt we had learned more of it in that one hour spent with him than we had learned before from many earnestly read books.

We drove home through the tender starlight. The flowers were hidden, like high-caste Hindoo women, behind the purdah of the dark. But the damp night dews had distilled the tender leaves of the cinnamon trees, and the air was superlatively sweet.

We went into the hotel a little tired, but very pleased with our first day in the Orient, and very content that it was almost dinner time.

ANDREW

We are poor sometimes, we two Nomads, but we are never without a retinue. There are two reasons for this. I am a helpless, incapable woman, with an acute need of servants. My husband, on the other hand, is phenomenally good to servants. They seem to know this instinctively. They flock to him, and install themselves in his service, and he always feels it difficult to dislodge them. We went into Colombo a party of six. I am not speaking of our company of twenty odd artists (more or less), but of our family party, in which were ourselves, our three children, and their European nurse. We left Colombo a party of eight. A Madrassi boy had attached himself to my husband, and I took the Cingalese ayah for Baby. We left Andrew weeping and wailing on the wharf, and doing it in the most approved and vigorous style. My husband was half inclined to take Andrew with him, but we did not need him; and I had rather discouraged the idea for two other reasons. I should perhaps be ashamed of them both; but this is a true history as far as it goes; so here they are:—Andrew was not good-looking. Now one must put up with ill-looking relatives, but I can never bring myself to be contented with positively plain servants. My other objection to Andrew was that he was a “Cold Water Baptist.” I don’t in the least know what cold water Baptists are. Were I to meet them in Europe, it is of course possible that I should like and respect them intensely; but I must own to a prejudice against native converts. Not so much because I believe that they are usually insincere, as because they are almost invariably hybrid. I believe in the suitability of all things, even in the suitability of religion. Andrew was lank and hungry-looking; he wrapped the native skirt about his legs; he pinned his long hair up with the orthodox tortoise-shell comb; but he wore a European coat over a dirty European shirt. Could anything have looked worse? I think not.

Andrew called himself a guide. He discovered my husband before we had fairly arrived, and insisted upon being engaged. We found him very useful, because he could speak English. And that was a comfort, though he never had any exact information and very rarely spoke the rigid truth. He never lost sight of his master for an instant, unless he was peremptorily sent on an errand to the other end of the town. My husband used to try to escape him. Once or twice we would really have enjoyed a short walk or a drive, alone. But we never had either. There were many exits from our hotel. We tried them all. Sometimes we would get as far as the corner. Then we would hear the plunk—plunk—plunk—of Andrew’s flying feet. “Salaam, sahib,” he would gasp breathlessly, “where are we going?”

He never would tell us his real name. I used to try to bribe him. His master would threaten him. He had but one reply for threat or bribe: “Andrew is my Christian name. I am a Cold Water Baptist.” He never seemed able to lessen my dense ignorance re the interesting subject of Cold Water Baptists. But he could talk glibly enough about the faith he had forsworn. And I observed that he seemed on intimate terms with the priests at all the native temples, and never failed to drop a copper in the temple box. I concluded that his conversion had been purely commercial. He told me that the “Padre Sahib” had given him three coats. It is easier to give a native a coat than a belief.

When we drove in the chill early morning, Andrew used to wrap his head in a Gordon tartan. If we chanced to pass the barracks, he promptly unwound his shawl, folded it up, and sat upon it. Doubtless he did not wish to embarrass me by having the sentry mistake him for the Colonel.

My husband often used, when he was too busy to go with me on my long afternoon drives, to send Andrew—partly for my convenience, as I always went into the densest native quarters, where English was not spoken, and partly, I think, to get rid of Andrew.

One afternoon I looked behind to speak to Andrew, who with the sais was perched on the back of the gharri. He was smoking a not bad cigar. I flew at him, verbally.

“No harm,” he said, with insolence that was, I am sure, unconscious. “No harm. The sahib is not here. I no smoke before my master.”

“You won’t smoke before me!” I said with undignified warmth. “Your master would not smoke in a gharri with me. And I won’t allow any other man to do so—black or white.”

Andrew looked at me stupidly and smiled. Then a thought flashed from my eyes to his. He knocked the fire from his cigar, and put the stump in his pocket. I had recognised my husband’s favourite Havanna, and Andrew knew it.

One day I bought some trifle from an itinerant native. We were driving, and I was wearing a pocketless dress.

“Give the man six annas for me, Andrew,” I said; “I have no money.”

“No,” he said smoothly, “a woman wouldn’t.”

I had one other experience with Andrew, when driving. My husband sent me to capture a scene-painter, and bring him, if possible, to the theatre. The man was that despised unhappy thing, a Eurasian. He was poor; and he drank too much. But I had seen a fan he had painted, and some water-colour sketches of Kandy which he had done. I knew that he was—in part at least—a genius. We found him after a great deal of trouble. He came out to my gharri, and I greeted him, as I would always greet an artist, and stated my business. He took off his shabby sombrero and climbed up to the seat I indicated beside me. Andrew broke into excited vernacular. The man beside me flushed, and started to move.

“What is the matter?” I asked.

“I tell him I no let Eurasian man sit beside my master’s wife. He must come back here with me and Sais.”

I was in a fine rage. I made Andrew get out and walk the several miles that stretched between us and the theatre. That night I had my husband tell him that, when he went out with me, he was, under no circumstances, to speak, unless I spoke to him.

But it was the day of our first performance that I really established myself in Andrew’s mind as a person of importance. I went to the theatre about four o’clock to see if the ayah I had engaged to help me at the theatre had put my dressing-room into proper trim. As I passed in, I noticed Andrew sitting on the lowest rung of a bamboo ladder. He was looking very vicious. He muttered “Salaam” rather than said it, and didn’t rise. I went into my dressing-room, and then marched on to the stage, to attack the poor stage manager.

“Am I to dress in that fearful hole?” I asked him sweetly.

Some one laughed. I turned round.

“I beg your pardon,” said Jimmie M‘Allister, “but do come and see the governor’s quarters.” Jimmie was, of all the boys in our company, my first favourite.

I followed him downstairs, and the stage manager followed me. I looked into my husband’s quarters.

“Do you want to see where the other ladies dress?” asked the stage manager softly.

“I say, do come and see our palace behind the scenes,” cried Jimmie triumphantly.

But I had seen quite enough. The artists’ quarters at the Colombo theatre did not compare favourably with the front of the house. I went meekly back to my dressing-room, wondering what could be done to make my husband’s den a little more comfortable.

“Would you mind speaking to this young imp of your husband’s?” said the stage manager. “He won’t let us take the governor’s things into the dressing-room.” My heart warmed to Andrew.

“Quite right,” I said; “the room certainly must be cleaned out first.”

“Oh! he doesn’t in the least mind the dirt,” explained Jimmie. “He’s offended because your dressing-room is better than the governor’s.”

I had known a prominent actor in—well never mind where—who used to dress luxuriously off the stage, while his wife climbed up a flight of narrow stairs, and wandered down a dark corridor to a gruesome little closet. But that any one would ever expect my husband to be brute enough to allow me to do anything of that kind had never occurred to me. I felt vexed for the moment. Then we came upon Andrew, sitting on the ladder, doggedly guarding his master’s luggage. I realised that Andrew was quite right from his point of view; and for a moment I felt tempted to gratify him by ordering my things to be put into my husband’s room. Then I remembered that we were to play the Merchant of Venice that night. Shylock wore one dress; Portia wore five. And then too, had I changed rooms, my husband would have changed back again. I sent for some coolies; I called my ayah, and superintended the cleaning of that room myself. Jimmie M‘Allister and the stage manager helped me. Andrew stood by sullenly. His master came in. Andrew sprang to him.

“The memsahib has a more nice room,” he said impressively.

“The memsahib has a beastly hole. Go and tell that Madrassi out in front that I want a carpet and a sofa and some nice chairs, here in half an hour, for the memsahib’s room—mind you.”

Poor Andrew gasped and went out. But his manner to me changed from that moment. An hour later Jimmie and I went to the bazaar and got the furniture for my husband’s room. I think Andrew forgave me when I came back with it. I took some curtains from a property box, and told him to tack them up at his master’s window. He answered me quite pleasantly.

I never had another encounter with Andrew; but I never could teach him to knock. He would walk into my dressing-room, and coolly pick up my hare’s-foot, or my scissors, without vouchsafing me one poor word of explanation. If I ventured to ask “What are you doing?” he replied, “Master want,” and went out. I used to beg him to knock; but I don’t remember that he ever did knock. Nor did he ever beat a retreat, no matter in what state of deshabille he found me. Finally, we used to turn the key in the door, if I had an entire change to make. Then he would pound on the door and cry so loudly that the people in front heard—“Open, open; Master want your red paint.”

Andrew and I grew better friends. He used to bring me some little present every morning. Three or four flowers, or a basket of cocoanuts, or a spray of cinnamon.

He said one day to my nurse—“The master like the memsahib. I want please the master—I must please the memsahib. When the memsahib grow old and her teeth drop out, the master will sell her and buy a new wife.” We overheard this remark of Andrew’s. My husband was delighted, and to this day often holds the threat over my silvering head. But I grew to really like Andrew, he was so unmistakably fond of his master. I believe that he grew to really like me, for the same reason.

OUR DAY OUT

And the locale of the Garden of Eden is claimed by at least three of the Eastern islands that we have visited. The island of Penang appealed the most seductively to my credulity; but before I saw Penang, I was convinced that Ceylon was in reality the site of the Garden of Eden. Colombo impressed me; Mount Lavinia convinced me.

Mount Lavinia is the Richmond of Colombo. The Mount Lavinia Hotel is the Star and Garter of Ceylon. But ’Arry and ’Arriet never go there. The demi-monde never goes there. The world and his wife don’t flock there. The European population of Colombo is so limited that it does not embrace either ’Arry or ’Arriet—it has no demi-monde, at least no palpable one; and the world and his wife are not numerous enough to flock. Mount Lavinia is a Paradise À deux. Nature is superlatively beautiful there. At the hotel there is an ideal chef.

For years we have had a habit of periodically escaping from every one and everything. Our life has been a busy one; it has been full of friction; but when the friction has threatened to make us forget each other a bit, we have usually managed to shake the dust of the high road from our tired feet, and to snatch a quiet breathing spell, alone, and together.

The second Sunday we were in Colombo we were up very early,—we were going to Mount Lavinia for the day. When we left the hotel the sun was just rising. I had a new frock on, and my husband was good enough to say that it was pretty. I tore it badly getting into the gharri, but it didn’t matter—he found a pin and pinned it for me. We had a long wait at the little station. We stood outside, and tried to guess which of the hieroglyphics painted in black on the white station was “Colombo” in Tamul, and which was “Colombo” in Cingalese.

The funny little train came sizzing into the station; in five minutes we had started. We looked at each other and smiled; our little holiday had begun. Critics might rail, and actors might snarl; it was nothing to us; this was our day out.

We sped through miles of cocoanut trees. Except near the little settlements, through which we passed every ten or fifteen minutes, we saw nothing but cocoanuts. Here and there the natives were gathering the ripe nuts. Here and there agile boys were stealing them, slipping up and down the trees like squirrels. The thousands, nay tens of thousands, of tall straight trees became impressive from their very numbers. It was very Oriental, very graphic; and just before it became the least bit monotonous, the train slackened a little. Then we passed a broken line of native huts.

Every Cingalese mother bathes her children on Sunday. Weather permitting (and in Ceylon the weather almost always does permit), every Cingalese ablution takes place out of doors, and in as conspicuous a place as possible. We must have seen some hundreds of native children drenched with soapsuds, swashed with icy water, or rubbed with oil that morning. Many of the adults bathe as publicly, but not so often. We saw one woman bathing eleven children, and they were all crying. The huts thickened, and we had reached a station. It was a pretty low brown building. It reminded me—though I don’t know why—of Anne Hathaway’s cottage. Brilliant flowering vines hung from the sloping roof. In the doorway was gathered a motley group. Two dirty Buddhist priests sat on the ground counting pice. A group of Cingalese women were eating cocoanuts, drinking the milk, and scraping the soft young meat out with their nails and teeth. The Cingalese women are most beautifully formed. They are upright and supple, and every beauty-line of the human figure is emphasised upon their persons. Their invariable white jackets contrast so splendidly with their dusky skin that one almost catches oneself wondering if black is not the desirable complexion-colour after all. Their brilliant lips, their tawny eyes, their gay petticoats, save the sharp black and white contrast from being too abrupt or too emphatic. A few feet from the women stood a group of Cingalese men, doing nothing. Their long hair was in every instance nicely pinned up with a big tortoise-shell comb, and their parti-coloured skirts hung in straight, listless folds.

A small detachment of the Salvation Army was singing “From Greenland’s icy mountains, From India’s coral strand,” very badly. No one was paying the least attention to them, however. The women were dressed in the Cingalese costume, with some slight additions where the genuine Cingalese dress is rather abbreviated. I thought it rather nice of them not to disfigure the picture by the introduction of clumsy blue frocks and big pokebonnets.

We went slowly on, passing a quaint string of native carts. The oxen were necklaced with roses, and most of them were surmounted by at least one small black boy. The carts were peculiarly shaped of course, gaily painted, and more or less embellished by nondescript draperies. Each cart was incredibly full. But the oxen were crawling along and seemed very comfortable. None of the natives seemed in the least hurry.

When we reached Mount Lavinia, Andrew, whom we had thought in Colombo, opened the carriage door. We gave him a rupee and told him to go home. He looked very indignant; but he went away.

What a day of days! The air was sweet and strong—you could drink it. Indeed, breathing was drinking in this paradise place. A few steps on, and the blue water laughed at our feet. A few yards up, and we saw the rambling old hotel, where we had been told that we would get the best dinner in India.

But before dinner, we had a long lounge on the vined verandah. We didn’t talk; we rested. My companion was very radiant over a cigar, and I sipped bravely at a glass of sherry. I don’t like sherry; but we had been advised to leave ourselves absolutely in the hands of the khansamah. He, I think, had spied the rent in my frock, for he eyed us rather dubiously and asked sadly, but evidently without hope, if we wanted champagne with our tiffin. We confessed that we did, and he brightened up wonderfully. He gave me a long verandah chair, and my husband another, and trotted off, without waiting for any further orders. He came back soon, with a tray of cigars, two glasses, and some milk biscuits. He gave my husband the cigars and the wee glass that held a thimbleful of something that looked deadly. Upon me he bestowed the glass of sherry and the innocent milk biscuits. I am no more devoted to milk biscuits than I am to sherry, but I nibbled and sipped obediently. It was my day out, and I meant to enjoy it, and everything it brought. My comrade was very happy with his cigar, and said that the mysterious thimbleful was very good, but he didn’t think I’d better taste it. That was apparently the opinion also of the khansamah; so I abode by the united decision of two superior intellects.

I felt a soft tug at my gown. I looked down. An ayah was seated at my feet; she was calmly taking the pin from my rent skirt. Then she produced needle and cotton and mended my tatters. Verily, the khansamah had taken us in hand.

The tiffin, even as a pale memory, defies description. We had a little flower-decked table in a window; we could look across the gorgeous garden to the purple sea; sea and garden were shimmering with golden glints of sunshine.

The khansamah waited upon us himself. He apparently knew that the tiffin was perfect, for he allowed us to decline nothing. He gave us soft-shell crabs, as I had never hoped to eat them out of Boston; and the memory of the mayonnaise haunts me still. I often dream of the curry. Some day I am going all the way to Ceylon to get such another tiffin; and if the cook is dead—“I’ll have a suit of sables.”

When the khansamah thought that we had had enough to eat, he marched us out on to one of the terraces of the garden. There he brought us our coffee and liqueurs. He brought out three cigarettes; and my husband, who doesn’t care for cigarettes, took them meekly.

We lazed a bit, and then employed a young gentleman of about five, to roll down hill at an anna a roll. He was really very interesting. The hill was steep but grassy. He started at the top, and brought up in the surf. He swam about for a few moments, and then came back to us, and did it over again. He did not wet his garments, for he wore none. We grew satiated before he grew tired. We paid him, and he carried his dripping person off, to offer his services to some officer sahibs that were in another part of the gardens.

We went for a long, slow walk. I went into three or four native huts, while my husband smoked outside and called in to me what wild risks I was running. The huts were built of mud, of dried banana stalks, of bits of wood, and of white-washed manure. The interiors were very clean. The Cingalese are scrupulously clean. The only exceptions are the priests and the lepers. I bought a piece of coarse embroidery from one woman. I did not want it, but she had given us milk and plantains. I bought sweetmeats from a wayside seller, and sat under a banyan tree to eat them. While we were there, an old decrepit man hobbled to us. He untied his well-worn pouch and took out a gray soapy-looking stone, about the size of a small marble. He laid it in my lap and asked for bukshish. We gave him a rupee, to get rid of him. I quite forgot about the stone until a year or more after, when I came across it one day. We were in Patiala at the time, and a famous lapidarian was there from Calcutta. I showed him the bit of stone. It was an uncut sapphire. And it turned out a very fair gem.

We concluded to be very extravagant, and drive back to Colombo through the moonlit cocoanut groves. We went back to the hotel to order a gharri and to pay our bill. Our happy holiday was nearly over; but still the best of it was to come,—the long delightful drive was to come.

That drive home was so beautiful that I almost forgot to be sorry that our pleasant jaunt was ending.

The weird shadows of the cocoanut trees fell softly on the white road. The native huts we passed were dark and silent. The natives, one and all, had eaten their evening rice, and gone to sleep. The Cingalese have not learned that it is sometimes economy to burn night oil. In their cities, torches of splintered wood sometimes help them to lengthen their day’s work; but in the country they go to bed with the birds.

I looked behind me, to impress my memory with the outlines of some unusually peculiar hut. Andrew was clinging to the back of the gharri with the sais.

As we neared Colombo, we drove through unbroken miles of pungent cinnamon groves. The moonlight was vivid. We were content and silent.

Colombo was wide awake. The officers’ mess was aflame with light. Government House showed a hundred lights through the mass of surrounding shrubberies.

“What a perfect night it is!” said one of us.

“What a perfect day it has been!” sighed the other.

“We will try to go to Mount Lavinia again before we leave,” said my companion.

“I wonder if the children have been good,” said I, as we drew up at our hotel door.

MY FIRST ’RICKSHAW RIDE

My husband would not ride in a jinrickshaw, nor did he wish me to do so. Of course, I was curious—very curious—to know how it felt to be rushed along, drawn by a “human horse.” He thought it wrong to use men in that fashion, and would neither step into a jinrickshaw nor countenance my doing so.

The night before we left Colombo it rained furiously. I suppose every one feels caged, once in a while. I felt caged that night. I remember walking up and down our long sitting-room, up and down, until my husband laid aside his book and said, “What is the matter?”

“I want to go for a ’rickshaw ride,” I cried.

“In all this rain?”

“You know I love to be out in the rain——”

“I can’t let you go alone, and I will not ride in one of those cruel carts.”

“I’ll take Nurse with me, if you’ll see that the ayah minds the children.”

“All right. I don’t think it’s right; but if you do, I’ll go and get the ’rickshaws.”

I flew into the nursery, and encountered another obstacle. My nurse did not approve of ’rickshaws either. She proposed a gharri ride. I told her that I was going in a ’rickshaw, and that, if she didn’t come, I’d go alone. She was incapable of letting me go alone; so she sighed and put on her things.

Does every one in England know what a ’rickshaw is? Almost every one ought by this. A ’rickshaw is not unlike a bath-chair. It is higher, lighter, more comfortable. It is not pushed; it is pulled. A jinrickshaw coolie runs between the two shafts, which he holds firmly in his hands.

We took two ’rickshaws. The manager of the hotel told the coolies that they were to run for an hour, and bring us back at the end of that time.

How it poured! but I was delighted with the motion, and never ceased to like it. They were very swift; they ran with an easy even gait. There was all the pleasure of driving behind a spirited horse and none of the responsibility. There were no reins to hold, no control to exercise. I leaned back on my cushions and enjoyed myself. They were sure of foot those brown runners; and I knew that though they ran never so swiftly they would never run away. As for their personalities, they have less personality than a horse. Their presence a few feet in front was no intrusion. They were merely the naked steaming means toward an exhilarating end of entrancing motion.

We rushed on and on, through the dark and the storm—such a soft, warm, pleasant storm. At last the coolies stopped. They had brought us into the cinnamon grove. I was glad to be there upon my last night in Ceylon. While we sat and sniffed the sweet, languid, scented air, the coolies rubbed each other down. Each carried over his shoulder a long towel-like rag. With these they gave each other a good shampooing. They did not withdraw into the shade or the shelter of the cinnamon trees. They stayed where they were, as pet horses might have browsed by the near way-side. The night was black; but the well-trimmed ’rickshaw lamps flashed steadily upon the clearly revealed coolies, showing their brown bodies red.

The rain fell in torrents. They seemed to like it; and as they towelled off each other’s sweat, they lifted their faces to the descending drench as tired horses might push their steaming flanks into a well found stream.

They halted three minutes perhaps—perhaps fifteen. I don’t know. I was thinking new thoughts, and one can’t measure thought with a tape measure.

They wrung the human rain and the rain of heaven from their rags, and started on their homeward run. My homeward run I should say, for they slept beside their ’rickshaws beneath the stars, or, if it chanced to rain, beneath their rickshaws. And I, who slept mostly in hotels, could hear, if I woke in the watches of the night, the peaceful breathings of my babies as they slumbered in an adjacent room.

The ’rickshaw coolies are not, I believe, blessed, or burdened, with many babies. They rarely have means justifiant of marriage. And in the Orient, marriage is more honoured in the observance than in the breach. Then too they die young as a rule, these “human horses” of the East. Consumption, in some one of its many deadly forms, cuts short their perpetual racing after the petty cash of listless-legged Europeans.

When we reached the hotel, they whined for bukshish with the usual mingling of cringing and of bullying. They were placidly oblivious of all the fine thoughts they had enkindled in my mind. They were not even curious as to what manner of woman I was, that I elected to ride through the rushing rain. I have so often seen the wonder-look upon the stupid face of a European coachman who has driven me aimlessly through the dark or the wet. But on the intelligent faces of my first ’rickshaw coolies, I saw nothing. Their feelings, their thoughts, were as locked from me as mine from them. And not one of their thoughts was of me. To them, I meant two rupees eight annas. No more, no less.

“Well?” said my husband.

“Well!” said I.

“Did you enjoy it?”

“Oh yes! so much.”

“Didn’t you feel wicked?”

“A little. But that will wear off, I think.”

Wear off it did. I became an inveterate jinrickshawist.

Did I shorten the life of any coolie? I don’t know. I provided many a coolie with an overflowing bowl of rice and curry, that made his life momentarily very endurable.

Would they better live longer and be hungrier?

Can we give them other, better work?

Ah! those are questions for statesmen, not for women.

The next day, when we left our rooms in the early morning, we found John, the Madrassi, waiting for us. We were taking him to Calcutta with us, and he was all anerve to start. John was, with one exception, the handsomest native man I ever saw. He was nearly six feet tall, and carried himself with superb dignity. He was fastidiously devoted to his own personal appearance, and we took great delight in his toilets. I remember him so well, as he stood outside our door, in the pale November dawn. He was dressed in the sheerest of white robes, or rather draperies; the upper cloth was of soft native silk; he wore a huge turban, snowy white, with one thin line of gold running through it; and in his ears he wore two hoops of flashing rubies. John never developed a desire to carry parcels, but it was his delight to carry our almost two-year-old baby. What pictures they used to make! She was a big dimpled baby, very white, with bright blue eyes and gleaming yellow curls. John was as black as a Madrassi can be, which is very black indeed; but he was always as spotless in his attire as baby Mona herself.

A man said to my husband, “You must not allow your servant to wear such turbans, nor, above all, to wear jewelry; and then at night he wraps a really valuable cashmere shawl about his miserable shoulders. It is shocking form.”

“My wife would be greatly annoyed if John dressed less picturesquely—” began my husband.

“But it’s most disrespectful, my dear boy, don’t you know.”

“My wife is very disrespectful. That I know.”

I came along in time to hear the last few sentences.

“Dear Sir——,” I said, “don’t you know that wherever MacGregor sits is the head of the table?”

“The natives must be kept down,” was all the reply vouchsafed me.

The Kaiser-i-Hind sailed at eleven in the morning. I had a good cry at nine o’clock—not because we were leaving Colombo, but because the dhobie had left us no underclothing but rags. It was my first experience with an Oriental washerman, and it grieved me. All the pretty, dainty things that my babies had worn during the long voyage from Adelaide to Colombo were ruined. Thorns and rocks had had more to do with that washing than had soap and water.

As we were leaving the hotel, Andrew, who had been paid in full the night before, and whom we had not expected to see again, arrived. He had begged to go with us and had been refused. Now he had made one heroic effort to carry his point. He had cut off his hair and broken his comb. Having Europeanised himself so far, he seemed to feel that we were in honour bound to take him with us. He even said to my husband that he would put on trousers when we reached Calcutta. He couldn’t do so in Colombo, because his wife was coming to see him off. He was broken-hearted when he learned that we really would not take him. He wept piteously on the pier and beat his breast. But his wife (she looked about sixteen) seemed very happy that he was not to accompany us. I thought that greatly to his credit, and gave her a rupee for no reason at all, save that I had so few that one less did not matter.

The ship was very crowded,—she had just come from London. The native merchants made the deck-crowd denser, and buzzed like flies in their last frantic efforts to sell us something—anything. Each rupee that we were taking away they felt a stain upon the record of their ingenuity and salesmanship.

As Colombo faded from our sight, we planned to return there on our homeward journey. But we said it doubtfully—we had learned that the plans of nomads are uncertain and changeable; and we have not yet seen Colombo again.

The Kaiser-i-Hind was full of English people,—army people, civil servants, and their contingent of memsahibs.

There were three Americans aboard beside myself.

I am often called a bad American. I certainly am not a rabid American. At times I am a bitter American. When I am among a lot of nice English people, and have the misfortune to meet the worst type of travelling American, I wince.

One of the Americans on board was a man of whom all Americans are justly proud; he is a soldier (with a great record), a gentleman, and a scholar. But not all the soldiers that have ever come from West Point, not all the scholars that have ever come from Harvard, not all the gentlemen that have ever come from Virginia, could have wiped out our national disgrace upon a boat that numbered among its passengers Mr. and Mrs. Frank Hunter.

They had been married two months. Whatever inspired Americans of their type to select the Orient as the scene of their honeymoon was, is, and always will be, a dark mystery. But there they were, glittering caricatures of our national life. There they were, amid a boat-load of nice English folk.

Mr. Frank Hunter did not wear quite such loud clothes as many of the Englishmen. But he wore them far more noisily. A magnified chess-board is nothing to a certain type of English officer in “mufti.” But though they make mistakes about their coats, they never blunder in their behaviour, those English officers—English and Irish, Scotch and Welsh, are they. But they are all gentlemen, in public at least.

Mr. Frank Hunter’s tailors were irreproachable; but his manners were simply shocking,—and English people are so easily shocked. The English people on the Kaiser-i-Hind quite forgot that there was a nasty something, called mal-de-mer. They were as sick as sick could be from the unavoidable proximity of the Hunters. I say “sick” advisedly; no other word would convey what I mean. Mrs. Hunter, on the whole, was worse than her husband. He sometimes smoked—rather frequently, in fact. When he smoked he was silent. Mrs. Hunter did not smoke. She was never silent, or, if ever, then only in the still watches of the night, and no one had the benefit of it—no one but Mr. Frank Hunter.

Mrs. Frank Hunter wore more diamonds at breakfast than all the other women in the boat put together wore at dinner. She dressed for dinner, but she dressed very high at the neck, which I thought a great pity,—the dimples in her chin told me that her neck was sweetly pretty. She gazed with prudish horror at the well controlled dÉcollete of the English women. They gazed less openly, but quite as disapprovingly, at her vulgar display of jewelry. The abuse hurled by Mr. and Mrs. Frank Hunter upon the Kaiser-i-Hind Commissariat was positively indecent. I have been better fed at sea, several times. But the ceaseless comments of the Hunters were far worse than the food. There was no escape from the perpetual clatter of their tongues; but we were not forced to eat the food. “Won’t I just be glad to see my nice new brown stone bungalow on Fifth Avenue!” exclaimed the bride one night at dinner. “Won’t I have something to eat though! Don’t your mouth water for batter cakes every morning? And aren’t you half dead for butter-milk?” She was speaking to me. I felt very angry, because she had hit upon something we had in common. I am excessively fond of butter-milk; and, when we were housekeeping in Australia, every Sunday morning that was cold enough, my husband used to make me “batter cakes” if I were good. But I could not bring myself to confess that I agreed with that horrid little American in anything. So I said nothing. She persisted, “Isn’t America the nicest place on earth? Don’t you just love it?”

“America is very nice in some respects,” I said softly; “and I should love my native land dearly, if there were fewer Americans.”

Mrs. Hunter did not say much to me after that. But the relief was slight. She talked incessantly to some one—to her husband if to no one else, and her sharp little voice pierced to the utmost corner of the deck. Oh! my sisters, can’t we be free without being vulgar? Can’t we travel without becoming a reproach to our beautiful land?

One night I left the dinner table early. If I had stayed longer I should have thrown something at Mrs. Frank Hunter, and that would not have enhanced the women of America in the eyes of that boat-load of people. I went on deck. The gentleman of whom I have spoken—the American soldier who was the peer, at least, of any Englishman on board—was leaning sadly over the rail. “Are you ill, General?” I asked him.

“No,” he said, “but I am ashamed of being an American! Did you hear that dreadful person trying to pick a quarrel with Colonel Montmorency, about the relative merits of West Point and Sandhurst? I stood it until she told him that her Uncle Silas was a major of militia and one of the best soldiers in the States. Then I left.”

We sat down and tried to console each other. We planned to petition Congress to regulate the class of Americans who travel. We have not yet done so, but I do believe that it was a good idea.

Mrs. Hunter kept up her vulgar, impertinent, irritating remarks until we anchored in Diamond Harbour.

The last time I ever saw her, she and her husband were standing on Chowringhee, gazing at the maidan. She was ablaze with gems, as usual. The natives doubtless thought her the European wife of a Rajah. They are, I believe, the only class of European ladies who in India in the day overload themselves with jewels.

“Frank darling,” she was saying, “it ain’t a patch to Central Park, is it? And their old Government House, as they call it—it can’t hold a tallow candle to the Capitol at Washington, can it now?”

I fled down Dhurrumtollah.

IN THE BURRA BAZAAR

We all grumbled when we were put off the boat at Diamond Harbour, and were told that we must go to Calcutta by train. The treacherous Hooghly was at the moment unsafe for so large a vessel. Of course, every one blamed the Steamship Company. But the very contretemps at which we grumbled gave us a first view of Bengal—a view that was extremely lovely. Our little train went slowly through the peaceful Bengali country. It was early sunset. Strange scarlet flowers hung from the tall trees. Now and again a graceful bending limb almost threw the long vine trails against our window frames,—for the windows were open, and we were pressing against the ledge as eagerly as our children. Here and there, half hidden by the thick green trees and by the deepening twilight, were square white tanks. Natives were bathing in them. Their gleaming black shoulders emphasised the silver water and the marble tanks. We passed cornfields that, with a strange heart-throb, took us back to Illinois. But the corn was not high for all that, and the gaily-clad Hindoos, who were working in it, were as unlike American darkies as they were unlike western farm hands.

“Come, come quickly!” cried my husband, from the other end of the carriage. I went very quickly, for it takes wondrous much to make him “cry out.” A few yards to our left lay a smooth sheet of water. It was quite a purple in the fast-fading sunset; and on its drowsy, blushing bosom lay great masses of dappled water-lily leaves, and on each leaf a great pink lily pressed. Thin lines of crimson, great patches of pale golden green, broke the purple sky. Tropical trees, heavy with white and yellow bloom, hung over the little lake; and on its white and purple surface rested the pink water-lilies, amid their green and gleaming leaves.

We passed great open spaces, and came to small huddled villages. Little mud huts were squeezed together in marvellous fashion. Men, women, and children sat outside their low doorways, and the more prosperous of the family groups included a calf. One had a long wreath of orange marigolds about his pinky-white neck; and a jet-black baby, who lay asleep a few feet off, was similarly adorned. The women were cooking the all-important evening meal; and none of them looked up to see our unimportant European selves.

What a bedlam when we reached Calcutta! It was dark now, and the station was badly lighted. Our advance agent met us, of course; and when he had assured my husband that everything was all right, that he had done everything he had been told to do, he bundled me and my babies into a gharri, the native servants clambered on to the box, the roof, or caught on behind, and we started slowly, if not decorously, for the Great Eastern Hotel.

A steady drizzling rain had begun, and I could see nothing through the misty gharri windows save indistinct masses of oddly-clad and unclad humanity and dim backgrounds of gray walls.

We stopped at a huge white building. The servants at the door took our arrival as a matter of course—if I can say that they took it at all, for they paid not the slightest attention to us. Mr. Paulding left his bearer to wrangle with our charioteer, and we followed him up to our rooms. An incredible number of coolies followed us, carrying our small luggage. I remember one great giant who groaned and wiped his brow when he unloaded himself; and yet he had only carried a cardboard box, and it was empty but for an apology for a bonnet that was made of two crape roses and half a yard of Maltese lace.

My first discovery was that our rooms were large and clean and cool. Then I made myself very comfortable in an immense cane chair, and took my bairns into it with me, all three of them.

Our native servants did not seem to do anything; but somehow I found my hat and gloves were off, slippers had replaced my shoes, baby was drinking hot milk, my boy and girl were munching spongecake, the luggage seemed rapidly to be unpacking itself, and some one had given me a glass of port wine and a plate of vanilla wafers.

“I wonder how they knew that I hate tea,” I said to Mr. Paulding. “They have wonderful intuitions, haven’t they?”

“John told dem,” said my small son briefly, very briefly, for the spongecake was good.

I have known men more industrious than my husband’s picturesque Madrassi servant, John; but I never knew any man with a more considerate memory. He was not indefatigable in doing hard work; but he was infallible in remembering what I liked to have done, and in making other people do it. I sipped my wine, and sighed. It was raining now in dense torrents; and my husband was still at the station, struggling with two of the great problems of a strolling player’s life—scenery and heavy luggage. I released Mr. Paulding with the assurance that we were entirely comfortable, and he rushed off through the storm to help his chief.

John had found where the nursery was; and he marshalled the pretty procession of my babies and their household out with a great deal of dignity. I sat alone in the dim, cool room, and dreamed, and rested. Visions of wild American plains came back—memories of Australia, of Europe, and Canada; I dreamed and dozed; and then I sprang up at the welcome sound of a footstep I knew, in whatever quarter of the globe I heard it. America, Europe, Australasia—they were behind me; Asia was before me. Another phase of our fascinating nomadic life had begun. My husband came in at one door, very, very wet. John came in at another. Behind him walked a half-grown Mahommedan boy, carrying a tray of the steaming tea my husband liked as much as I loathed it.

“Salaam, sahib,” exclaimed the newcomer.

John said something hastily, and the boy added:

“Burra salaam, memsahib.”

In Europe I am more than indifferent to all the woman’s-rights movement. We have so many more privileges than men; and I am sure that I have all my rights, for I never missed one of them. But in the East I waged a long war for the equality of the sexes. Not that I believe that women are men’s equals—I don’t; my observation has been to the contrary; but I wish women to be treated as men’s superiors. Clever John had fathomed my vulnerable narrowness; and so he prompted the boy, and the boy cried, “Burra salaam, memsahib.”

“His name is Abdul,” said John, as he drew an easy chair near mine. “He will be our khitmatgar. We will pay him fifteen rupees a month. To-morrow I will find a bearer, an ayah for the other missie baba, and an ayah for memsahib.”

“Haven’t we enough servants?” pleaded my husband feebly. John shook his handsome turbaned head.

“No sir,” he said, “we want many. One does very little here.”

John, like all Madrassis, was a natural linguist. But he spoke unusual English, even for a Madrassi. He left us to the ministration of Abdul. More than half the servants we had in the East were called Abdul. This was our first Abdul. He was a frightened looking child, with long, lean, awkward legs, and great, lovely, brown eyes. Presently John came back with three or four nondescript-looking, almost garmentless coolies. They carried on their heads chattees of steaming water. In a few moments John came back again.

“The hot bath,” he said. “It will be dinner in an hour.”

When I went to dress I found John laying out a gown for me.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

“Miss Wadie” (i.e. my nurse) “is tired,” was all he said, and he began to sew a loose bow on to one of my slippers.

They gave us an excellent dinner, for which we were unfeignedly thankful. The room was crowded, and there was, of course, a babel of tongues. But the servants were fairly quiet and only fairly slow, and the gravies were distinctly good. As we left the dining-room, I saw a strangely familiar black face peering at me through the square window of a queer house-like place that was erected in the hall. I paused involuntarily. It was a glimpse of home.

“I’se right proud to see you, lady,” said the dear old black.

I nodded to him and went on without speaking to him. There was a ridiculous something in my foolish throat. He had found me, and I had found him. How he knew me for one of the countrywomen of his adoption I shall never know, but to me every thread of his curly white wool was eloquent of “de ole Virginie state.”

I made friends with him the next day. His name was “Uncle Peter Washington,” and he had come to Calcutta, as I had, with a “trabbling show.” The Ethiopian histrionic combination of which Uncle Pete had been a bright black star, had, after two brilliant performances, succumbed to the tropical heat and the non-appreciation of the public. Uncle Pete, like most Virginian darkies, was versatile, and we found him installed as a Steward at the Great Eastern. He used to send me dainties, not on the bill of fare, and beg continually for “passes.”

After dinner, although we were a little tired, we went with Mr. Paulding to see the Corinthian Theatre, where we were to play. We found it a surprisingly nice play-house—a little dirty, and rather empty of scenery; but it could be cleaned; we had brought our scenery with us; and altogether it was an encouragingly possible place. We went up the outer stairs of the adjacent house, and met the local manager—a vivacious Frenchwoman. It was late when we left her, but I coaxed for a little drive through the streets, like the spoiled woman I was. The rain had ceased; the stars were almost dancing in the sky; and so, at night, I had my first good look at Calcutta.

We had strange half glimpses of odd, weird sights; we caught snatches of plaintive native songs, sung in the monotonous Hindoo treble.

Hamlet was to be our opening bill, and we were very busy. But I, who am usually rather lucky, found time to see a great deal of Calcutta. I ran errands, or rather drove them, and that took me to a number of strange places. I found my way to the native lumber yards. I learned to bargain, in the vernacular, for timber. Moreover, I learned that the only way to ensure its delivery at the theatre, in time for the carpenters, was to see it loaded myself; to see the bullock carts start, and to follow them every inch of the way, until we passed up Dhurrumtollah, and I halted my unique procession triumphantly at the door of the Corinthian Theatre. I learned to descend into the quarters of the dhursies and to return to the theatre with a gharri load of sewing machines and tailors. I even grew so expert in the Calcutta highways and byways that I more than once pounced upon our dhobie in his lair, and wrestled with him for the proper laundrying of some treasured garment.

Best of all, I came to know the Burra Bazaar as few Europeans have ever known it. We first drove there one brilliant Sunday afternoon. A lady, who lived in Calcutta, and Jimmie M‘Allister went with me. My husband refused to go to the place, which he had been told was aswarm with evil smells and more evil natives. He was rather a dilettante sight-seer was my lord and master; and he regarded my inveterate prowlings as something to be permitted on broad principles of personal liberty, but never to be countenanced, much less encouraged. I was an old habituÉ of the Burra Bazaar before I could induce him to go there with me; and he never went but once.

The Burra Bazaar fascinated me powerfully. Day after day I went there, when I should have been performing sacred social duties. The more I went to the Burra Bazaar, the more I wanted to go. It held me—called me in a thousand ways. What a drive it was from the hotel to the outskirts of the Bazaar. We started in Europe, and stopped in the heart of Asia! Through China the liberal into China the conservative, on to India the wily, into India the tolerant, into India the dense—the real! Through Bentick Street, where the Chinese shoemakers “most do congregate,” into “Old China Bazaar,” where Fan Man sold silks that had been made in the wonderful bamboo looms of Canton, dipped in the huge vats of Chinese colour, beflowered by the deft needles of the incomprehensible Mongolians. Fan Man was not the proprietor of the only silk shop in “Old China Bazaar Street.” He had some dozen rivals. But national consanguinity is more to a Chinaman than trade vigilance—I can say nothing more emphatic of Heathen John’s love for his Heathen brother man. While I sat in one Chinese silk shop, the retainers of all the other adjacent silk shops clustered about the apparently doorless doorway; they manifested every appearance of surprise at the unprecedented bargains offered me by their fellow past grand master of the brotherhood of selling. When I shook my head, pushed aside the coveted masses of silken beauty, and returned to my gharri (with a reluctance that was disgracefully ill-disguised for an actress), they scurried back to their shops with an agility that was more rabbit-like than Chinese. A Chinaman does not unduly urge you to enter his shop. He is too dignified—too Chinese; but once in!—Ah! well, their wares were very lovely, and very cheap, compared with all my preconceived standards of price. Silk and such fabrics were not the only commodities of the Old China Bazaar. Carved ivories, painted porcelains, and bamboo everythings were in emphatic evidence. And there were lesser stores of many other articles.

After Old China Bazaar we came upon the stronghold of the nondescript Parsi merchants. What had they for sale?—What hadn’t they? A few among many of their for-sale-offered commodities were second-hand American cook-stoves, tin boxes, topees, cardigan jackets, broken sewing-machines, pickles, dried-fish, hand punkahs, umbrellas, rusty music-boxes, artificial orange-blossoms, Bibles, cigars, gin, toys, lamps, portiÈres, mildewed books in every known and unknown tongue, cod-liver oil, and a few thousand other things. I even saw a pair of skates there once, not roller skates, but really true skates.

Then the streets grew narrower; they wound and twisted in and out of each other and themselves. Great gray houses towered thinly up toward the glittering sky. Low, narrow doorways led into uninviting, windowless booths. Fat, greasy babus squatted on the filthy little verandahs, making up their books. Our gharri caught and stopped. The street was too narrow. An incredible number of natives were wedged in between our wheels and the adjacent doorways. Beyond were multitudes of black and brown humans—seemingly eternal multitudes! The gharri wallah and the sais got down, and a few dozen of the crowd helped them to extricate our equipage. The proprietors of the pitiful little shops clung desperately to the wheels, shouting the praises of their wares into my bewildered ears, and cursed the charioteers for not leaving me for ever glued where I was, or, at least, until I had emptied my purse and depleted their emporiums. We went slowly and difficultly on, through the sickening, pungent fumes of condiment shops, past great heaps of chillies that made me sneeze and sneeze again. We saw tons of buttons, miles of tinsel, crates of cheap wax beads, infinities of shawls. The saries were without number; the piece-goods shops were numberless, and the varieties of the other shops were as bewildering as the differing wares they held, and the differing castes of the tradesmen who shrieked the superiority of their merchandise with all the frenzy of mad dervishes. Now and anon we caught, through a narrow gateway, a glimpse of a dirty, spacious courtway, where liveried servants slept on empty boxes, and snored their allegiance to His Highness the Rajah.

Pigeons, thousands and tens of thousands, fluttered over our heads, or flew down to demand the corn which was never refused them. They looked at me confidently with their clear red eyes. One fat fellow, I vow, was an old friend of mine, in the days when I spent many sous for corn to scatter on the Square of St. Mark. Perhaps my head was a little dizzy with the crowd, the babel, and the stench. I thought the pigeon spoke to me. This is what I thought he said: “We’re both grown since we met in Venice. You have changed for the worse. You used to wear bright blue plumage and bronze feet, and you had long shiny ropes of hair down your back. Now you’ve black feathers, and you seem a very ordinary sort of person. But with me, everything has changed for the better. ‘How did I get here?’ Oh! a missionary brought me over. But the missionary’s wife was too fond of pigeon-pie, so I flew from Alipore to here, the Burra Bazaar. I am sacred here; I can do what I like, and have what I like. It will be a cruel day for me when the missionaries convert all the Burra Bazaar.” And then the pigeon laughed, and added, as he winged away, “But it won’t be in my day—oh no!”

When I had penetrated into some two or three of the tall, empty-looking houses, and learned how packed with treasure they were, I experienced an added delight in merely driving by them, and thinking what silken, embroidered, bepearled loveliness lay in great piles within those silent buildings.

The tortuous complications of the Catacombs at Rome are nothing compared with the winding mazes of the Burra Bazaar. I believe that I have seen every corner of the Burra Bazaar. I know my way into it. But my way out of it I never knew; and I always shall regard the natives who do know their way out as exceptionally clever.

I have done a great many foolhardy things in Asia. Proper European memsahibs looked askance at me, and even my long-suffering husband remonstrated. One of the two exploits which gained me the greatest disrepute as a wild unladylike woman was going into the Burra Bazaar at night. My husband was playing Rob Roy. I was not quite strong, and my Scotch accent was not considered safe. Consequently I was out of the Bill. That was a rare event in my professional life. And I made much of it. We were preparing for the Lady of Lyons. That was a play that my husband had always declared that he would never under any circumstances play. He did play it in Calcutta, as a concession to the local management. He now meanly says that he played it to please me, but that is not accurate; and, at all events, he was in a fine rage over the whole business. Claude Melnotte was not a gentleman he admired; and he used to say some very unkind things re the whole play, which a more sensitive Pauline might have resented as personal.

“What are you going to wear, dear?” I asked him sweetly, at what I thought a propitious moment. My gentle husband frowned.

“Wear!” said he. “I shall wear anything John lays out,—a Roman toga, or Ingomar’s furs, or Shylock’s gown, or anything else. You didn’t for one moment suppose I was going to buy anything for that fool of a part, did you?” I sighed.

“Then let us not play the piece,” I ventured.

“Now look here, Jimmie,” was his answer, “you know you’ve wanted to play Pauline for years; you know I’ll never have any peace until we do play it. So don’t let us say any more about it.”

“But I don’t want to play it unless the piece is nicely dressed. I am having such lovely things made. You must have some as nice.”

“You’re a very foolish girl to buy a lot of new things for that idiotic piece,” he said.

I went to the other end of the room. I sat down and looked melancholy—as melancholy as a woman can who has fully determined to have her own way. My companion preserved a manly silence for at least three minutes, then he said:

“Look here, Jimmie, how much money do you want?”

“Oh! none, thank you so much,” I said as sadly as I could, “all my things are paid for.”

“How much money do you want to get my things with?”

“You are a dear, good boy,” I said; “and I’m sure you’ll make a lovely Claude.”

Strangely the compliment failed to please. My lord and master stalked out. But at dinner-time he gave me a roll of rupees, on condition that I would not mention Melnotte’s clothes to him until he had to try them on, and that he should only try them on once.

It was in connection with The Lady of Lyons finery that I went into the Burra Bazaar at night, almost at midnight. I had been searching for days for a certain piece of embroidered pine-apple cloth. One day Caloo, my head dhursie, said to me, when he went away at sunset—

“Memsahib want me finish Saturday, memsahib must give rest stuff to-morrow. I not get I cannot make finish.”

I was in despair. That night I drove my husband down to the theatre.

“Are you going home? or are you coming in?”

“I am going to look once more for my pine-apple cloth,” I said meekly.

“Where?”

Ah! that was the question I had hoped to avoid.

“I’ll try at the edge of the Burra Bazaar,” I said. My poor husband looked at me in despair.

“You must come in with me,” he said. I went with him,—obedient wife that I am. But when we reached his dressing-room I began to argue with him gently. At last we compromised; which is about the best thing close friends can do when they differ. I went to the Bazaar, but a friend went with me,—a big blond fellow, who looked the soldier he was, and whom half the natives in Calcutta knew as a fierce “lal-coatie sahib.” Dear friend, he is dead now! He was, a few months ago, a victim of ignoble cholera.

I had some difficulty in making the gharri wallah understand that I really wished him to drive to the Burra Bazaar. But when he did understand, he drove stolidly across Dhurrumtollah into Bentick Street. We stopped a moment while my escort bought me an immense bunch of spicy roses “to smell when we get into the Bazaar”; and while he was paying for it, a lame boy hobbled up with a huge ridiculous cotton-wool lamb. That was bought also “for the boy, if we ever come back.” Down Bentick Street, where the dexterous Chinese shoemakers plied their trade by lamplight, beyond two noisy “Sailors’ Rests,” then into the dark. Neither of us spoke. My friend afterwards told me that he was a little anxious as to the outcome of my mad escapade. I was expectant. Every door was barred. Every house was dark. Asia was asleep. Where thousands of chattering natives had crowded about my carriage that very morning, not even a dog was to be seen. We drove for over two hours. We passed, here and there, a turbaned, belted policeman. Each looked at us with as much amazement as a sleepy Oriental can display, and salaamed. It was brightly, weirdly light now. The moon was up, and the dusty deserted streets lay before us like snow. We knocked at many doors, oftenest without response. A few of the doors opened after a long pause. A drowsy-looking native examined my bit of cloth by the light of our gharri lamps, and shook his head. He retreated behind his heavy door, shut and barred it. We went on. Not once, but twenty times, that was our experience.

But long after I had quite relinquished all hope of getting my pine-apple cloth, I insisted upon driving on. The moonlight was so marvellous. It was so wonderful to be one of the three or four awake among myriad sleepers. One old merchant was more enterprising than the rest. He had, he said, just what I sought. He went into his house and was gone some twenty minutes. Then he came out to us again. I leaned over the gharri with anticipatory excitement. The old Hindoo drew from his sleeve a piece of pale blue satin, on which two slippers were heavily embroidered with gold and seed pearls. Very beautiful they were in the midnight moonlight. I longed to take them back to my good-natured husband, but I was too vexed with the ancient Brahmin, who had brought me gold embossed blue satin instead of cream embroidered pine-apple cloth, to deal with him. “Cedar jao,” I snapped out, and the patient horses went on. I forgot my petty millinery vexation in looking upon the magic high lights and the fathomless chiaroscuro made by the white magnificence of the moonlight and the black splendour of the old gray walls.

“What—oh! what is that?” I whispered, forgetting my own vague musings and remembering my companion suddenly.

“That is a fakir chap. He has made a vow, don’t you know. His arm is paralyzed; he has held it high up above his head for a vow, and now it has grown that way. It doesn’t hurt him, but it looks jolly queer, doesn’t it?”

An incongruously European clock struck midnight.

“Are you frightened?” I asked my friend.

“A little,” said the soldier, smiling; “and I am sure your husband is more so.”

“Not he,” said I; “he’s singing ‘Roy’s Wife of Aldivalloch.’ ” But I added to the sais, “Nautch ghÂt jao.”

Poor sais! He was fast asleep; standing bolt upright behind us. I woke him, and sent him up to sit with the gharri wallah.

“I wonder why that fakir was the one native out at midnight,” I said, as we returned out of the unknown moonlight of Asia into the familiar gaslight of cosmopolitan Dhurrumtollah. My friend smiled involuntarily, but he said nothing.

“Oh, I know what you think,” I said, with a woman’s swift, safe impertinence. “You think that he was hunting pine-apple cloth to offer to a new god.”

“Or something equally important—to him.”

That was a mean remark; so when I saw my husband come from the Corinthian Theatre archway, I turned ungratefully upon my companion and said:

“ ‘Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard!’ ”

“Are you all right?” said my husband.

“Oh yes,” said I. “Did we have a good house?”

Once afterwards I went into the Burra Bazaar at night. It was Sunday, and my husband was dining with some men. I ordered the gharri at ten. Maggie, my pretty little Madrassi ayah, came out to see me into the carriage.

“Kither, memsahib?” said the salaaming sais.

“Burra Bazaar jao,” I answered.

Maggie caught at the gharri door, “Memsahib, no, no, not go—-must not go,” she cried. “No safe, much harm.”

“Nonsense, Maggie,” I said rather roughly; “go in to your missie baba. Cedar jao, Gharri-wallah.”

We had left the hotel, and were living in a bungalow. The drive to the gate was long and winding. When the durwan swung open the gate, a woman ran out from the shrubbery. Maggie pulled the gharri door open and climbed in.

“I go please with memsahib,” said the girl.

“Aren’t you frightened?”

“I more frightened stay safe bungalow, know memsahib gone harm.”

Maggie sat opposite me. Her hands were meekly folded upon her saried knees. When we passed into the dark, questionable streets of the native quarter, Maggie did what she had never done before—she came and sat beside me. The dark grew denser: she covered my miserable, useless little hand with her great, faithful, black hand. A pigeon cried; and a sick woman, lying inside one of the tall, mysterious houses, moaned. Maggie was trembling.

“Bungalow jao, sais,” I said.

A lady, who had lived most of her life in Calcutta, said to me one night, at a rather crowded dinner table: “Is it true that you went into the Burra Bazaar with only native servants and at midnight?”

“Almost true,” I replied. “It was an hour or more earlier.”

“What a horrid thing for you to do!” was the frank rejoinder.

I was too sorry for my hostess to answer my gentle critic; but what tales I could have told of her in Paris! Some people do indeed believe in the forgiveness of sins, if they are conventional ones.

A friend, who knows me well, said to me recently: “How can a woman, who is so over-timid about most things, do so many foolhardy things?” As a matter of fact, I am a great physical coward. But I have never felt afraid of the natives among whom I have gone so peculiarly; nor do I believe that I have ever been in the slightest danger. As far as the Burra Bazaar was concerned, I am sure that I was as safe as a queen surrounded by a loyal army. The Orientals are not prone to kill the geese that lay golden eggs. I spent too many rupees and too constantly for the thrifty storekeepers to have seen harm come to me. Then think of the hubbub that would have been raised if one European woman had been murdered, as I was often told I would be! A terrible punishment would have been meted out to my gharri wallah and sais. They were bound to protect me, and so was every Hindoo of their caste. I often left the gharri, and went where it could not go; but I noticed that, unless I had my ayah with me, the sais always followed me. I was inveterate and tireless in my prowlings in the Burra Bazaar. I saw strange sights there, and smelled strange smells. I never received an uncivil look, much less a rude word.

I had great fun several times in the Burra Bazaar. Where the press of humanity was most dense, I used to take a rupee from my purse, and, holding it up, ask, “What will you sell for this?” Oh! how they rushed about me! What strange bargains they offered me! And how good-natured they were. They whined and begged and prayed, they pushed and jambed each other against the gharri door. They called me “Mamma” in the most persuasive tones. But when my choice was made, they fell back and salaamed and laughed gleefully as I drove away.

My husband went with me to the Burra Bazaar once—once only. We were going to play Our Boys. To my horror, my husband elected to play Perkyn Middlewick. I begged him to play Talbot; but he was caught by the idea of playing a part so entirely new, in every way, as Middlewick would be to him. The rehearsals began, and he grew quite infatuated with his part. He began to plan elaborate costumes for poor old Mr. Middlewick. I pretended to not quite understand the kind of brocade that he wanted for a beautifully brilliant vest. In that way I inveigled him into going with me into the Burra Bazaar. He sniffed at Bentick Street; but he had been there before. With the Bazaar itself he was unmitigatedly disgusted. When we reached the silk shop he broke into open rebellion.

“How do you get in?” Sais pushed open a narrow door. A flight of steep, shallow, almost perpendicular steps were all that we could see, and we could only half see them. They were innocent of railing; they went through space in the simplest way; and the only concession to light-headed mortals was a questionable-looking rope that dangled from the floor above.

He caught my arm: “You are not going up there! We’ll get our necks broken, or, at the very least, be robbed.”

“I have been up there very often,” I urged; “and there is no other shop where we are so likely to get what you want.”

I went up, and he followed me gingerly. The room, into which we crawled rather than walked, was about ten feet by twelve. Four Brahmins sat upon the floor; and the glass cases that lined the walls from ceiling to floor must have contained some thousands of pounds worth of silk, of crepe, and of embroideries. There was a chair in the room; it had not been there when I paid my first visit,—I flatter myself it had been bought for me, and doubtless out of my money. The proprietor of the shop pushed the chair an inch in our direction; he placed a mat beside it, and left us to decide how we would divide them.

We stayed a long time in the tiny room. The presence of a man inspired them to bring out their choicest treasures. What exquisitely beautiful things they showed us,—soft priceless crÊpes, thick pliant satins, matchless embroideries; they tempted my companion even more than they did me. We found the very piece of pathetically ridiculous brocade that he wanted, and he was as pleased as a boy.

Getting down the stairs was more than getting up them had been; but we accomplished it with assistance. Our drive home was very slow. My comrade stopped every few moments to buy some outrageous article. “I shall never come here again in all my life,” he said; “do let me enjoy myself.” It was a quaint gharri load of merchandise we carried back to the Great Eastern. Even the stolid durwan looked amazed.

A few hours later my husband said to me, “Tell me truly, do you really, honestly like to go into that place?”

“Honestly, I love it.”

He gazed intently at me for a few moments; then he said, “You are a wonderful woman.”

Which showed that the Burra Bazaar had enriched his understanding even more than it had impoverished his purse.

A CHRISTMAS DINNER ON A ROOF

Is it only three years ago that we ate our Christmas dinner on the roof of an old Calcutta palace? How hot it was! The starlit sky was murky and shimmering. The air trembled and throbbed with the electrical heat. But when the plum-puddings came in we had to stop the punkah wallahs; the swing of their big hand punkahs blew the flaming brandy out. The Major had been saying nice things to me through all the courses. He was so polite and attentive that he only had one of his Bombay oysters,—the khitmatgar thought that his master did not want the others, and whipped up the plate. He was a Madrassi, was the Major’s khitmatgar; he liked oysters, and he had no stupid, superstitious theories about Europeans defiling food. The Major never touched his sweetbread; and he missed most of his biscuit glacÉ. Yes; he was self-sacrificingly courteous. But when the hand punkahs stopped, he leaned back in his chair and drew his handkerchief across his brow, with the air of a man who would continue his polite attentions if he could, but really could not.

It was rather a home-sick little Christmas party. English people are very apt to be home-sick when Christmas finds them out of England. We two were not home-sick; we were the two strangers—the two newcomers; and yet we were the most content of any there. We were nomads, gipsies, strolling players. We had learned to carry our home in our hand-satchels, and in our hearts. Our wandering life had broadened and deepened our cosmopolitanism as much as it had sharpened and quickened our patriotism. We had lived so often in a tent! and we thought that palm-decked, star-canopied old roof the pleasantest possible place to eat our Christmas dinner. I was especially happy. I always love to eat in the open; and this old roof that lifted me high above the crooning Calcutta streets, and seemingly half-way to the stars, had lifted me into a warm, spicy atmosphere of high delight. It was a pretty scene. The white-clad servants moved softly; the adjacent houses were very quaint with minarets and intricate arches, strange latticed windows and droll roof-gardens; the deep perfumes of Oriental flowers came up from our host’s garden. Everything was richly Oriental except the table at which we sat and feasted. That was as English as a very ingenious hostess could make it. Great satin roses were woven in the damask of the table linen; in the centre of the cloth lay a large silken Union Jack; on it crouched a bronze lion; he was resting on a bed of roses. Around the flag was a loose wreath of holly and mistletoe, and we each had a bit of mistletoe at our plates. I saw the subaltern’s lip tremble a bit when he put his sprig in his button-hole,—that was very weak and babyish of him, was it not? Yet strangely enough that boy has won high military honours since then. I was greatly interested in him at the time, because he was the first subaltern I had met in India; and I had heard so much about subalterns before I reached the East.

The Major and his wife, our host and hostess, we had known well in Italy. I had been delighted to dine with them; and now, that the dinner was almost over, I was congratulating myself on having had so pleasant a time.

The plum-puddings had caught properly, and the breath of the punkahs came upon us again as a new sensation of delight. They fanned the creaming wine until the ice tinkled against our thin glasses, until the champagne frothed and bubbled in a perfect tempest of conviviality.

“Do you know the history of this old palace in which you are living?” I asked the Major.

“No,” he said; “or at least very little of it. A mighty Nabob lived here once. This roof garden, where we are now, he had made very lovely for his favourite wife. She was of a higher caste than his. Her stepmother, who hated her of course, had given the girl to the Nabob in the father’s absence. The girl’s father had gone up to Peshawar, I believe, to buy camels. It was a year or more after the Nabob’s marriage that the girl’s father came back to Jullundar and found his favourite child gone. The stepmother said the girl was dead; but the servants told the old man the truth; so he killed his treacherous wife and came to Calcutta to find his daughter. Well, he found her on this very roof. Now a Hindoo girl who weds beneath her caste is degraded for ever,—she has become a pariah, an outcast, and all her family are defiled. So the old Brahmin—he was a Brahmin, of course—took out his knife and plunged it through his daughter’s sari into her heart. And she cried ‘Salaam’ and died; and he went away rejoicing.”

“But how did he get in, and how did he get out?” demanded the subaltern. “Aren’t the women’s quarters in a Nabob’s palace better guarded than that?”

“Sir, those are details, mere details,” snapped the Major. “Were you not taught at Sandhurst that the subaltern is shot at sunrise who asks his superior officer for details?”

The subaltern saluted (with a walnut shell in his fingers) and fell into the conversational background.

“It is quite true, the story, Mr. Howard,” said the Major’s wife; “only my husband is telling it so badly.”

The Major went on smoothly. “When Abdul came back⁠——”

“Who was Abdul?” asked an exacting civilian.

“Abdul was the Nabob,” said our host curtly.

“Oh!” said the civilian, “I thought perhaps you meant my bearer; his name is Abdul.”

“When Abdullah returned,” continued the Major, “and found his favourite wife dead, he tore his beard and cast his turban at her feet. Then he went into the women’s quarters—the part of the palace where the other wives lived, for the dead girl-wife had had apartments of her own. Abdullah had not been in the women’s quarters since his last and happiest marriage. His wives gathered about him; they fell at his feet and kissed them. He raised them up kindly. He gave them wine to drink, and in each glass of wine he put three three-grained morphia pills. When they had all fallen into the sleep from which he knew they could not wake, he rose up and went, saying, ‘Allah, I had ceased to love them, but I have killed them gently, that they shall feel no pain when they burn upon my funeral pile.’ He went back to his dead girl-wife. He laid a satin cushion beneath her head; he strewed sandal-wood dust upon her, then he borrowed a scimitar from a eunuch and died.”

“I had no idea that the Hindoos were such good husbands,” said the pretty American girl who sat on the other side of the subaltern.

“Might I be allowed to ask,” said the subaltern, “as a guest, whether⁠——”

But the Major’s wife had looked at me and smiled, and as we rose, he jumped to his feet and rushed to the filmy portiere that hung across the archway which topped the garden steps. They were broad, white, marble steps, well called garden steps, for they led from the artificial roof garden into the great wild place beneath, where mangoes and roses, palms, ferns, and tuberoses crowded amongst the tangling wood-flowers of Bengal.

“Gather all you want,” my hostess said, as I paused, spell-bound beside a bed of strangely sweet flowers. “Gather all you like, but don’t ask me the names.”

“Oh! I know what those are,” said the American girl who had come down behind the rest of us. “They are mogree flowers. The nautch girls wear them in their hair—I saw them at Amritzar. When the girls dance, the flowers perfume the air; and if a very big man—high-caste or rich I mean—comes in, they throw mogree flowers at him.”

We strolled on through the shapeless grounds,—we two Americans. She pushed her pretty dimpled arm through mine. “Does it not seem very strange to you to be ’way off here in India?” she asked me.

“My life has been so strange,” I said, “that nothing seems strange to me, unless I am in a very thoughtful mood, and then life seems so inexplicable that everything seems strange.”

We were standing by a funny little square basin of water. Oriental moss broke the outlines of its marble sides. Strange coloured lilies slept upon its breast. Here and there a lantern of Japanese silk dotted the mangoe trees. Hattie tapped the warm marble with her little blue slipper. “Isn’t it pretty!” said the girl, pointing with her big blue eyes to the roof that we had left. It certainly was very pretty. Through a break in the palm trees we could see our host and his men guests. They were smoking, all of them, but they seemed rather thoughtful. Above them, swung on invisible wires and on rope vines, were innumerable Japanese and Chinese lanterns. My eyes lingered lovingly on the soft yellows and the clear purples of the pretty illuminated paper balls. Above all glittered the matchless stars. “I think that I should like to live in India,” said the girl at my side, softly; “wouldn’t you?”

“I love my life almost anywhere,” I said, turning from the fountain to pull a mogree flower. Then I kissed my young country-woman in the moonlight. I regard kissing women as more to be condemned than giggling girls and crowing hens. But some strange wave of tenderness welled over me for the maiden at my side.

When the men and the coffee came down, sweet tinkling music crept to us nearer and nearer from the shadow of the trees. A band of native musicians had been engaged—for our sake I fear,—they were such an old story to the Anglo-Indians there. I crept among the trees to examine their barrel-like drums and their indescribable string instruments. Mine host and mine husband followed me. We came back by the little lily pond. The subaltern and the American girl were there, looking at the lilies so intently that they did not see us.

“There is something remarkable about American women,” said my English husband, with slow impertinence. “A man goes half mad until he gets an American wife, and then he’d give half the world to get rid of her.”

“Yes,” said the Major, “I regard the influx of American women into the British ranks as the chief danger that now threatens our forces. I do not understand their apathy at the War Office, and at Westminster.”

I pelted my two tormentors with mogree flowers, and we went back to our hostess, leaving the young people by the lilies.

It was very late. The native musicians had taken their big bukshish and gone. A few faint streaks of light replaced the faded stars. It was almost morning. We heard the tramp of men; we caught the martial rhythm of a good old English carol. The privates of our host’s regiment were coming (those of them who could sing) with the bandmaster at their head—coming to serenade the major’s lady.

They sang with a right good will. When they broke into “Rule Britannia,” the bird-like soprano of the pretty American girl rose shyly above the strong heavy voices of the men. She had come back to the old mother country, as so many American women do, led back by love. It was morning. India seemed to have shaken off night, oppression, superstition, sorrow. And as the full, big glory of the day broke, the soldiers stood at attention and sang—with husky voices some of them, “God save the Queen.” And in the distance, through the air, some one or something breathed the dear old tune of “Home, sweet Home.”

ORIENTAL OBSEQUIES

A Hindoo Burning GhÂt

The arch-devil death is so unconquerable a foe that the veriest atheist must easily find it in his heart to forgive the theist who has invented the consolatory theory of immortality.

If we believe death to be but the imaginary boundary between two lives, then death ceremonials become very inconsequential. If we believe death to be the end, the last sad rites assume a terrible significance. Strangely enough, the most elaborate funeral customs prevail among the staunchest believers in an after life. But then mankind always has been inconsistent. Man is born of woman!

In the East I learned something of the post-mortem customs of five races: the Chinese, the Hindoo, the Parsi, the Burmese, and the Japanese.

We are apt to think ourselves very advanced—we who are beginning to believe in cremation. The Hindoos have practised it for thousands of years.

The funeral pile of a Rajah sometimes costs lakhs of rupees. In Calcutta I have seen a body burned when three rupees covered the entire expense.

The rich Hindoo may be somewhat exclusive. The Hindoo masses do everything simply and openly. They bathe out of doors. They pray out of doors. They cook out of doors. They die out of doors, and their bodies are burned out of doors.

There are three burning ghÂts in Calcutta. The first we visited was the cheapest and most primitive of the three. It was also the most interesting; for it was the most eloquent of the Hindoo populace.

It was a longish drive from our hotel to the burning ghÂt, but the last half, or more of it, was crowded with interest, for it was along the bank of the sacred Ganges, and thousands of devout Hindoos were worshipping.

Only a mile or two inland was Government House, upon the gates of which crouch two colossal lions—in stone. The British lion is more manageable in stone than in alien jungle flesh. The British lions of the Calcutta Government House gates are very impressive, but it is a rare thing to see them without native crows perched insolently upon their hard heads. Inside those gates all was a subdued, well-bred hubbub, for Lady Lansdowne was to hold a drawing-room that night. Anglo-Indian Calcutta was athrob,—European dressmakers and native dhursies were exceedingly busy. Here—where we were, on the banks of the Ganges—were myriad human creatures to whom Government House was but an architectural intrusion. They were enrapt in the observance of their racial customs; and, to them, our European customs were less than nothing. It was a little like a country fair—and greatly unlike. I learned then and there that specialisation was not a nineteenth century development. The banks of the Ganges were divided into booths, not by walls, but by occupational differentiation. We stopped—our underfed horses were glad to stop—we stopped and watched a, to us, meaningless dance. I thought it more awkward than suggestive. That may have been because I was ignorant of its religious meaning. Then we saw a hundred people clustered about a naked fakir. His unbarbered hair was braided into disgustingly many plaits. His brown face was painted a ghastly white. He lay naked upon innumerable spikes (they were dull-edged spikes), and as he bled (in reality he did not bleed; he balanced himself so beautifully), the surrounding Hindoos prayed to KÂli, and praised the fakir. We saw enchanted pigs. We passed inspired fortune-tellers. We stopped to water our horses at a sacred fountain,—I can’t imagine to what it was sacred, for I saw our disreputable steeds drink from it, and I saw many to-the-core afflicted lepers fill their chattees from it. A pile of common stones based the fountain. The lepers touched them reverently with their hopeless stumps. It is perhaps well for the human intellect that “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.”

When the gharri wallah and the sais said we had reached the burning ghÂt, we found our inquiring minds intercepted by a crude brick wall. I have said that the Hindoos burn their dead in the open,—that is true; but in Calcutta the Hindoo has grown thrifty, and he hedges his burning ghÂt with a wall the closed door of which is sternly suggestive of bukshish.

The sais pounded upon the door with the butt of the whip, kindly loaned by the gharri wallah. An old Hindoo (he was sucking sugar-cane) opened the door, after a dignified pause. We gave him a rupee—deferentially, and passed in. I stumbled upon something, and gave a dainty little European shriek. The something sat up and rubbed its eyes; it was one of the burning ghÂt coolies, and it had been having a sleep. I marked the holy mud thrice with my Louis Quinze heels, and I stood beside a smouldering funeral pile. A crack—not unlike the report of a pistol—drove me back. The heat had broken through the dead man’s skull. Our brain is our best servant, or our mightiest master, in Europe; in the land of the Hindoo, it or its casement is the last human part to protest against the extinguishment of death.

The funeral pile of a poor Hindoo looks very like an ordinary kitchen-yard wood pile. But if you go up to it—close up to it—you discover something very like a human form—a glowing charred mass, but proudly distinguished from every other shape, animate and inanimate. In the East I tried to look at things reasonably; not from any exaggerated sympathy with the subjugated native, but because I wished to get from the East the utmost available information and mental capital.

When I pulled myself together, after shrinking from the first funeral pile I had ever seen, a phrase flashed to my memory—“Purified as by fire.”

That is just what the Hindoos do. They purify their dead by fire. The body is burned until absolutely nothing remains but a handful of ashes—ashes wholly free from any unclean or poisonous matter.

A second body was brought in. Two coolies carried it upon a rude litter, woven from coarse grasses, and held together by outlines of bamboo. Two of the dead man’s brothers followed, chatting pleasantly.

Four stout sticks of wood were driven upright into the ground at the corners of an imaginary parallelogram, about six feet by two. Between these four posts were loosely laid sticks of dry, cheap wood. When the pile was a little more than three feet high, the body was laid upon it. A dirty piece of crash, of the quality the coolies wear about their loins, partly wrapt the dead. One of the brothers stepped up and poured about four ounces of oil over the body. This ensured a quicker cremation, but was something of a luxury, and not a universal practice. The oil must have cost about three pies. The other brother paid the coolies, who shouldered their light empty litter and marched gaily out. More wood was piled upon the dead. A thin stick was lighted at the other funeral pile, which was now flaming finely; the second pile was lighted, and the cremation of the newcomer was begun. The two brothers appeared very interested in the igniting, and decidedly pleased when it was accomplished. They squatted down upon the ground, just so far from the pile that they might feel that their scant, filthy garments were fairly safe from the sparks, but near enough to watch all the changing phases of the cremation, and to see easily when it was consummated.

They untied a dirty rag from about a small bundle one had brought with him. They took out a small earthen bowl; it was clean and shining; and so was the brass chattee each lifted from his filthily-turbaned head. The chattees held water; the bowl held curry and rice. They fell to eating with gusto. And pray why not? They were eating to live. Their brother was burning to live—to live in Hindoo Paradise. From the Hindoo point of view his state was far the more blessed; and from all I saw of coolie life, I am not inclined to think their point of view wrong.

While the dead burned and the living ate, I looked about me, and thought. I must not claim to have felt much; it was all too strange to me for feeling to be less than numbed. My first observation was that my husband and the friend who was with us had withdrawn from my near vicinity, in the meanest manner. There they stood, on the very edge of the Ganges, and with their two brave backs squarely turned to the interesting rite we had come some miles to witness. When I say the Ganges, I mean of course the Hoogly, which is one of its mouths, and therefore as sacred to the Hindoos. I thought at first that they were smoking, because I have noticed that my husband usually is smoking when he escapes an appreciable distance from my side. They were not smoking; and our friend afterwards confided to me that they were discussing “the present condition of European politics,” but discussing it languidly.

Then I saw that the cremation, which had been in full blast upon our arrival, was completed. There were two distinct kinds of ashes. The human ashes were carefully gathered into an old chattee. The authorities do not allow those ashes to be thrown into the river, and I understand that they never are thrown there in the presence of Europeans. The ashes of the wood were swept swiftly away. The bits of wood not quite burned, were frugally collected to be utilised in the next pile.

The two men had finished their curry and rice. They began to play some native game of chance. They used pebbles for the game itself, and splinters from the adjacent funeral pile did nicely for counters.

The men—my European men, I mean—came back and said that they would like to go home. So we went.

Life is so hard for the poorer natives of India that it is not surprising that they take death so coolly. They have so little to live for; they live so difficultly, so miserably, so inadequately, that to them death has ceased to be a devil, and has become, instead, an angel of deliverance.

The most satisfactory acquaintance I made in Calcutta was with a physician whose father was a Scotsman and whose mother was a very high-caste Hindoo woman. Aside from my personal liking for the man, I found him satisfactory because he could, and did, explain Hindoo customs to me exhaustively, and also in terms intelligible to my Europeanly-developed mind. A few nights after we were first at the burning ghÂt we asked him how an attempt to introduce Western crematory arrangements would be received in Bengal. He shook his head. He personally would welcome the innovation (he, by the way, was a Christian); he felt sure that some of the better circumstanced, better informed Hindoos would also welcome it; but the Hindoo masses would resent it bitterly. The attempt would be foolish, I think. Why force upon so strongly conservative a people a reform for which they have absolutely no need? Would it serve any good purpose? I think not. It would do nothing except widen a breach which we, for many reasons, should do our utmost to heal.

To me, the system of the Hindoo burning ghÂts, of which I saw every detail, was not nearly so repulsive as the system of the Parsi Towers of Silence, of which I only saw the outside, and could but too well imagine the inside. I wish the Parsis would abolish their method of disposal of the dead in favour of another method, as sanitary, but less revolting. But the Hindoo custom seems to me entirely commensurate with the Hindoo needs and the preservation of the general health of India.

I went to the burning ghÂt once at night. Night is the time of Hindoo leisure, as indeed it is of most native peoples. The enclosure was crowded with burning piles.

One night we sailed down the Ganges. The outlines of the attendants of the dead and of the funeral piles were sharply silhouetted, against the black background of the dark night, by the flames of the gruesome death fires; and from that part of the shore sacred to Hindoo worship came the shrieking and the songs of many thousand half-mad devotees.

In a primitive part of interior India, I once saw a Maharajah’s funeral pile. It had cost a positive fortune. It was built of expensive spicy woods and saturated with costly oils. It was richly gilded; and the dead was wrapped in embroidered silken sheets. For an incredible distance the air was sweet and pungent and thick with the perfumed smoke.

I remember having thought when a child that the literally sweetest experience I ever had had was the attending of a High Mass at St. Peter’s in Rome. But now I must own that the sweetest smell I ever smelled was the burning of a Maharajah’s funeral pile.

ORIENTAL NUPTIALS

A Hindoo Marriage

To Hindoo women, marriage is of even more importance than it is to women in general. Indeed, I know no race to whose women it is more important; for marriage is the sum total of a Hindoo woman’s existence. She has no interests beyond her home, no possibility of outside compensation if her marriage is a failure.

Even conventional, conservative India is beginning to throb with nineteenth century restlessness and Occidental changeableness. There is a great deal to be said on both sides of the burning question of child-marriages. I propose to say none of it, but to confine myself to a description of a Hindoo marriage that I witnessed at Jubblepore,—confine myself without commenting upon the race theories of which it was a ceremonial expression.

Children are still married very young in India. But the custom is not clung to, save by the ultra orthodox Hindoos. I have known three sisters to be married in one month, in a high-caste family. The eldest was sixteen, the youngest was eight. A Hindoo girl is in the full bloom of womanhood at sixteen.

The marriage I saw was between Brahmins of a strict caste; and I believe that the only unorthodox detail was my presence. I went in the early morning to the bride’s house. She was a slender, pretty girl of twelve. The bridegroom (who had not yet arrived) was an intelligent fellow—five years her senior. Twelve and seventeen years of age mean very much more in the East than in the West.

This marriage happened to be a love match. I should think that that is now true of nearly half the Hindoo marriages. The children of the caste play freely together, and their baby likes and dislikes develop with their quick development. Family love is very strong among the Hindoos. And the children have rather large influence with their parents. Hindoo girls are, I believe, rarely reluctant to marry. Indeed, they reminded me of a line of Byron’s. They seemed more in love with the prospect of marriage than with any particular prospective husband. It was my observation—which was, I must say, not exhaustive—that few Hindoo marriages are unhappy. The same has been claimed, I understand, by some partial writers, for les mariages de convenance of France.

The first duty of Hindoo bride and bridegroom, on the Chief Day or wedding day, is ceremonious ablutions. It was after that duty had been fulfilled that I arrived at the bride’s home. For many days ceremonies dear to the Oriental heart had been taking place. But they were fashionable rather than religious. They were self-granted indulgences of a ceremony-loving race, and in no way augmented the validity of the marriage, which was secured entirely by the ceremonies and the oaths of the wedding day, prescribed by the ShÁstras.

It was some time after my humble entrance that the splendid arrival of the bridegroom occurred. He came on horseback, as a Hindoo bridegroom should, and he was surrounded by all his relatives and friends, which was the acme of Hindoo good form. By the bye,—a high-caste Hindoo is as polite as a Japanese. Courtesy is as much the religion of a Brahmin as of a Japanese. But Hindoo courtesy is less celebrated than Japanese courtesy because it is less graceful (though not less picturesque), and because it is not, as it is in Japan, common to high and low. Politeness is the sign of a Hindoo gentleman. It is the birth mark of every Japanese—from the Mikado to the humblest coolie.

I do not know which was the more gorgeous—the Hindoo bridegroom or the dark roan horse he rode. Certainly, the bridegroom looked the more important. The steed seemed bored, which showed a most ungrateful spirit, for never yet was horse more sumptuously caparisoned. Beneath his shaggy, unkempt mane he wore a red strung necklace of glittering jewelled talismans; about his neck was a triple row of native gems, and similar jewelled braids marked his face into wonderful parallelograms; upon his head was proudly placed an inverted feather duster, such as European ladies use for treasured bits of bric-a-brac, which the parlour-maid may not touch. The decoration of the unappreciative animal’s tail was gorgeous and unique. The saddle-cloths were beautiful in detail, if not in shape; they were exquisite specimens of old, orthodox Hindoo embroidery. Hindoo customs are changing very gradually; Hindoo art is unchanged and unchangeable. It has developed; it has not been modified. The saddle-cloths were stiff, broad ovals, heavy with pearl-specked, gold embroidery; they were edged with red, silken fringe. Above the saddle-cloth rose a golden, swan-shaped saddle. Enthroned upon it sat the bridegroom. Over his head a servant held a wonderful red and yellow umbrella; two fan men followed close, holding the quaintest fans I ever saw; the sticks were of carved silver, and the fans, shaped like antique spear-heads, were made of odd painted glass, deftly embroidered here and there with jewels, and edged, as was the fan and all of the horse’s caparisons, with elaborate fringe. The four servants were dressed as Hindoo servants should be, in Hindoo livery. The bridegroom wore wonderful brocaded clothes; his eyes were thickly ringed with khol; his lips were flaring red with betel-nut; his velvet cap was heavy with embroidery; his jewelry was abundant and glaring. In brief, it was in all ways a most correct Hindoo marriage procession. His people followed him with beaming faces, carefully arranged costumes, and foreheads smeared with the paint and ash-marks of high-caste Brahminism.

We clustered about the door to bid him welcome—the bride’s mother in front, and the closely veiled red-clad bride next. The mother received with many ceremonies the dismounting bridegroom. The bride ran shyly forward and pinched his foot. That was in warning that he might find married life full of vexations. But he smiled with proud superiority as he salaamed elaborately to his girl-bride.

We followed him into the house. The bride’s father, crying out to the gods that he would honour and receive well this SnÁtaka who had come to ask a maiden’s hand, offered the young man a seat—offered it with many words of welcome and compliment. The bridegroom sat down, after calling the elder Brahmins everything that is honourable, superior, and admirable. Then they performed the peculiar worship of the “blessed and kind waters,” the girl’s father providing all the impedimenta of the ceremony. The elder man offered the younger a tray of sweets, called madhuparka. The bridegroom called upon the gods to partake of his noble father-in-law’s bounty. The gods did not do so—that I could perceive; but no one seemed disconcerted, and the bridegroom ate a little himself. The host called to a servant to bring a cow. The bridegroom protested that the cow was an innocent and useful animal, and entreated that its life might be spared. The elder Brahmin conceded this; which ended the welcoming ceremony, which is called madhuparka, after the sweet which is given to the bridegroom. Many years ago it was customary, at a Hindoo wedding, to sacrifice a cow and distribute the fresh beef.

Then came the KanyÁ-dÁna ceremony; the giving of the bride by her father to the bridegroom. The bride and bridegroom sat together, facing the east. Near them, but facing the north, sat her parents. The father “worshipped” the young couple; and all the guests called upon the gods for a thick shower of blessings. The priests handed the father sacred grass and water, and then they prayed with him, in Sanskrit. Then the old Brahmin rose up, and placing the girl’s hand in her lover’s, but with a blade of grass between them, said solemnly to the bridegroom, “She is no longer mine; she is thine.” The bride’s mother pronounced glad consent. Then the young Brahmin, holding his wife tightly by the hand, and looking at her, but speaking to the gods, said, “I entreat you, oh my gods, to bless and prosper the gracious man and wife who have given me this most sweet gift.” A priest drew from between the clasped hands the blade of grass. The marriage was irrevocable. They were man and wife for ever.

Then the proud young husband, looking very manly and handsome, said to his bride, clearly and earnestly, words that I thought very sweet, although they were partly prescribed. “Moved by the gods, the great god Varuna has given you to me, oh my dear, that I may know ambrosial happiness. Your father in giving you to me has given me his very life. You are my life of life.” He laid his slim brown hand upon her veiled right shoulder. “It is Love that gave this, Love that received it. O Love! all this is thine. My bride, enter thou the Ocean of Love; I accept thee out of Love. Thou art rain; the heavens give thee, the earth receives thee.” Are not those beautiful words? They are prescribed, truly; but so are the words of our marriage service.

Then came the KautukÁgÁra ceremony—the prettiest part of the marriage. I was allowed to see it, as a great concession. The young husband and wife went, with a priest and a number of Hindoo maidens, into an inner room. This room is strangely painted, and is called KautukÁgÁra. The bride tied a love-knot on her husband’s wrist, and he did the same to her; then he drew the veil from her dimpled brown face and kissed her; then he replaced the veil with a soft silken sari, that he had brought as a gift to his bride, but the little glowing face was left uncovered. The priest took a bit of red string and tied together the garments of husband and wife, and placed a crown of tinsel, of gold, silver, and jewels upon her head. A prayer was made by the bridegroom—a prayer that their hearts might grow into each other; and while he prayed, he painted, with collyrium, his bride’s eyes, and she painted his. Then he gave her some droll presents, which he produced from a mysterious somewhere among his own garments. I noticed a porcupine-quill and a looking-glass. Then he tied about her neck the marriage string. It is an odd necklace—a cord upon which a strange melÉe of trinkets are hung. It is called the tali. It is worn by all married Hindoo women. It is almost if not the only thing that I have never known a Hindoo woman to pawn. The tying of the tali ended the KautukÁgÁra ceremony. We returned to the other room.

The VivÁha-hÔma or marriage sacrifice began. The young couple sat upon a primitive, flower-decked altar. Then the priests poured ghee-libations to the invisible gods. Then the bride’s father anointed her head heavily with ghee, saying, “Become thou the sovereign ruler over thy father-in-law, over thy mother-in-law, over thy sister-in-law, and over thy brothers-in-law”—a very liberal invocation; but I thought I observed that, in the majority of high-caste Hindoo families, it was most frequently fulfilled. Hindoo women are very potent members of Hindoo society, and in home life they are often supreme. I know many Hindoo men who are extremely devoted to their wives, and consider them before all others.

The young husband was rash enough to confirm his father-in-law’s large prophecy, and added to the bride, “I take thy hand that thou mayest live with me as thy husband, for a long time; the gods Bhaga, AryamÁ, SavitÁ, and Purandhi have given thee to me that I may be a householder. Soma gave thee to Gandharva, Gandharva gave thee to Agni, and Agni gave thee to me with wealth and sons. As in the word SÂma the syllables SÂ and ama are mutually connected and interdependent, so are we; I am ama, thou art SÂ. I am the heavens, thou art the earth. As a SÂma verse is related to Rik of which it is composed, so am I to thee; then shouldst thou follow me. Like these pairs, let us marry, produce progeny, obtain sons; may they be many and may they live long.”

Then they performed the ceremonies of As’ma’rohana and Mangal Fe’rÀ. Near the altar burned a sacred fire. About it lay a circle of stones. The bridegroom caught his wife’s hand and said, “Come lady! place thy foot on this stone, and be as firm as it is. Resist whatever is evil.” He stooped down and placed her right foot upon the stone. Together, but he preceding her, they went round the fire, treading carefully upon the stones. Back to their seats they went. The bride gave an oblation to the fire, her husband saying, “This woman prays that she may be pleasing and helpful to her relatives, and that her husband may live long.” The little bride was looking very important, but oh! so tired. Four times they went round that flaming fire. Four times she gave an oblation, and he repeated his little speech.

Then they performed a ceremony which, when it was explained fully to me, I thought very significant. It was called Saptapadi, or “taking seven steps.” Seven heaps of rice were laid upon the floor, near each other, slanting toward the north-east. Again the bridegroom took his wife’s little brown hand. She put her foot upon the first heap as he said, “Take the first step and become the partner of my drinks.” On they went, she stepping on each little rice heap, he saying, “Take the second step and become the partner of my food.” “Take the third step and become the partner of my wealth and prosperity.” “Take the fourth step and become the partner of my good health.” “Take the fifth step and become the partner of my cattle.” “Take the sixth step and become my companion in all the seasons.” “Take the seventh step and become my friend.”

That ended the serious part of the long complicated ceremony. The newly married twain fed each other solemnly from a bowl of sugar; and then grave ceremonial gave way to mirth and noise. Presents were made to the priests. A feast was served; and an excellent feast it was. They gave me some, but I had to eat it apart; with them I might not sit, nor eat,—even the courtesy of a high-caste Brahmin failed before such a desecration of caste purity. All night long trumpets blared, shrill native fifes shrieked, drums and wild songs rent the air, and great fires flared up to heaven, making the big clumps of slender bamboos look red.

I fear I have been tedious; I hope I have been clear. A Hindoo marriage is an intricate performance. I have not described it entirely. The religious ceremonies were supplemented by many others that were customs, not observances of faith.

The vows of a Hindoo marriage are most beautiful. Unfortunately they are repeated in Sanskrit, and the bridal pair rarely, if ever, know Sanskrit. Let us hope that they know the meaning of the words they utter parrot-like. Certainly young children are as ignorant of the sense as of the language. I have seen a Hindoo bridegroom of five—a sweetly pretty boy he was.

But the ritual of the Hindoo marriage ceremony, whether it means much or little to the celebrants, can, at least, show us what the great founders of mighty Hindooism meant Hindoo marriage to be. And it behoves us to understand the spirit, the essence, of Hindoo life before we alter it by the right of might—I mean the might of right. Moreover it behoves us to know how Hindoo usages work. Child-marriage is revolting; but I have heard Hindoos make one or two tiny points in its favour. I saw something of Hindoo home-life, and I thought that it was, as a rule, devoted and happy; I know more than one eminent Hindoo to-day who is beautifully under his wife’s little brown, be-ringed thumb.

The Hindoo women cling to their racial customs far more pertinaciously than do the men. I knew several delightful Hindoo women; they despised me, but they were very kind and courteous, and I admired them exceedingly. One of them was a woman of great intellectual strength and commensurate culture. One day she said to me, “What is this ‘woman’s rights,’ of which so much you talk?” I disclaimed any share in the epidemic that had attacked so many of my sisters, and then I explained to her the movement as eloquently as I could, and as justly as a woman was able to do who despised that of which she spoke.

“I see,” she said, turning her great, languid eyes on mine; “they would have us renounce an immense, veiled, real power, for a little apparent power; they would make us lose our power over men, to have, of ourselves, and our lives, the little control that men do have of themselves and of their lives. In Europe, women who are not strong, think too much, talk too much. The big thought in the little brain will not go, only one part of it. And the sound of their own voices it makes them mad.”

Nothing so surprised me in the East as did the upper class Hindoo women—their content, their position, and their enormous influence. The men of Ind are comparatively easily converted to our social modus operandi. We underrate the strong opposition we will encounter from the Hindoo women.

KING THEEBAW’S STATE BARGE

We went from Calcutta to Rangoon. In Burmah the shadow of a great personal sorrow fell upon us. Our reminiscences of Burmah are too sad and too sacred to be put between the covers of a book. But there is a great deal that is interesting that I may try to tell about Burmah before I catch up my little personal narrative in China.

Burmah has almost unprecedented natural wealth. Minerals, woods, marbles, and gems are in Burmah in seemingly inexhaustible stores. Useful vegetation springs in spontaneous plenty from the pregnant soil. Nature does almost everything for the Burmans, and yet, Orientals though they are, they are exceptionally industrious. The palmyra tree leaf gives them paper. Butter, sugar, and flour, or their substitutes, grow on trees. Game, fish, fruit, and vegetables are most abundant. And yet they work—the men and women of Burmah—work with a will and to a right good purpose.

The marvellous pagodas, that are the artificial glory of the Burmese landscape, represent all that is best in Burmese art, all that is most persistent in Burmese industry. They are indescribably beautiful, with their huge, graceful, jewelled peaks and their lace-like, golden carvings. Lepers swarm at their gates. Heavy, pungent flowers are scattered before their thresholds, and often beneath their shadows lie the full cemeteries of the Europeans. They dot the Burmese landscape like huge jewels—do these matchless pagodas, and their sweet, swinging bells and singing gongs break the Burmese silence with clear, tinkling music.

Except the “monkey-slipping-tree,” almost every tree in Burmah is festooned with a creeper,—such wondrous creepers! About the tree trunks glide snakes, pythons, lizards, chameleons, scorpions, and deadly centipedes. In the river wallow gruesome alligators.

King Theebaw is no longer in Burmah; but Burmah is foul with his memory, and the more odious memory of his chief queen, Soo-pyah-lat.

Theebaw came of a race in which insanity had found many a victim. The kindest thing that can be said of his reign is that it was the reign of a madman. But for Queen Soo-pyah-lat there is no such possible excuse; her brain was as clear as her heart was bad.

Theebaw was married to three wives; they were sisters, and were named Soo-pyah-gyee, Soo-pyah-lat, Soo-pyah-galay; but Soo-pyah-lat was the real queen, the chief queen, and she ruled her two sisters as well as Theebaw’s concubines, or “under wives.”

Opium, wine, and liquors were forbidden to the king’s subjects, but not to the king. His potations were so deep that they will be remembered when he is forgotten.

“The King is still drinking.” No one thing has ever been said oftener of any one monarch than that was said of the notorious Theebaw, King of the Burmans, Suzerain of Mandalay, King of the Rising Sun, Lord of the White Elephant, the Golden Umbrella, and Lord of Earth and Air. If one tithe of what has been during the last twenty years written about King Theebaw is true, if a fraction of what they now say in Burmah of him is true, why then a worse monarch never sat in absolute power upon a barbaric throne.

It is a strange fact that the Burmese—the pleasantest, most easy-going of all nations—were ruled for centuries by a cruel bloodthirsty dynasty. The predecessor of Theebaw, King Mengdon, seems to have been rather gifted, but he was shifty and treacherous. King Theebaw—unless Christian literature has wronged him as it never yet wronged heathen prince—had every bad quality and no one redeeming one. His orgies, his debauches, the stories of his “posture girls,” are unequalled in the chronicles of a continent of which many lurid things have been written.

Things were certainly fast and furious while Theebaw ruled Mandalay. But I doubt if King Theebaw ever did rule at Mandalay. Queen Soo-pyah-lat was the veritable potentate; she ruled Theebaw. He had an abundance of wives, but when he showed any special favour to any wife other than Soo-pyah-lat, she promptly had that other wife trampled to death by the royal elephants, or killed in some other equally pleasant way. Then she would, most probably, take King Theebaw in their state barge for a little post-dated lune de miel. Theebaw seems never for an instant to have resented, disputed, or resisted Soo-pyah-lat’s supremacy. It was Queen Soo-pyah-lat who hated the British with an intensity beside which ordinary Asiatic hatred was nothing. It was Queen Soo-pyah-lat who forced Theebaw to hold out against the English forces, long after resistance was worse than vain. On the first of January 1886 King Theebaw, was finally and absolutely overthrown; but before that date he had caused England much anxiety and his patient subjects great misery.

How often have the eyes of all England been turned toward that wonderful palace at Mandalay; and almost invariably the wires flashed to the nations this message: “The King is still drinking.” Yes, the king was still drinking. Before his gin-filmed eyes swayed the lithe forms of the flower-decked “posture girls,” and the palace yard ran blood—the blood of many victims. Wonderful Burmese carvings glimmered and glinted on the palace walls, and the big gems rose and fell on the bad queen’s breast.

To me there is something very pathetic about the story of King Theebaw. He was born to a great opportunity. He became the ruler of a most charming people, the absolute master of as interesting and as beautiful a country, and as productive, as any on the globe. And his manhood went down beneath a bad woman’s jewelled foot—he sold his kingship for a hogshead of grog; and wherever his name was spoken, men said with disgust, “The King is still drinking.”

When Theebaw ascended the throne in 1878, an eminent Englishman wrote of him:—“He is little over twenty. He is a tall, well-built, personable young man. He is very fair in complexion, has a good forehead, clear steady eyes, and a firm but pleasant mouth. His chin is full and somewhat sensual-looking, but withal he is a manly frank-faced young fellow, and is said to have gained self-possession and left the early nervous awkwardness of his new position with great rapidity.”

Ah, what a different appearance he presented when he was dethroned in 1886! In eight short years he had committed or countenanced atrocities that entitle his name to be bracketed with the names of Nero and Caligula.

It is happy for Burmah that Theebaw and Soo-pyah-lat are gone for ever. The industrious, happy natives eat their morning, noon, and evening rice under a gentler, if an alien, rule. But what pictures they must have made in the days and nights of all their glory—the weak bad king and his strong bad queen!

Think of them in their state barge. It was a picture in itself. Great golden gods gleamed and glowered on the segregated prow. One of these indescribable metallic majesties rode upon a grotesque golden horse; and gods and horse had for eyes jewels of incredible size. Upon the deck was a house of precious woods. It rose pagoda-like, and was crowned with a big gem which, fastened to a strong, slender wire, flashed, above the barge, like a heaven-sent star. Rare journeys they must have had up and down the lovely Burmese rivers. There are three great rivers in Burmah. They rise in the high mountains, where the snows never melt, and they take their wonderful course to the Indian Ocean. Trees crowd on their banks,—trees that are golden and red and purple with fruit, and yellow and white with blossom. The scents of mangoe and pine mingle with the fainter perfumes of the orange and papaya and plantain. Wild asparagus lifts its slim feathers everywhere. Yams and sweet potatoes grow in wild plenty. Down to the river’s edge for drink come huge elephants and the fierce one-horned rhinoceros. Sleek leopards and striped tigers fight with the wild hog, and hunt the Indian roe and the axis. Wild-cock, quail, pheasant, and partridge scurry among the scented under-bush; and great peacocks spread their wonderful fans amid flowers that are brighter.

Small wonder if Theebaw and Soo-pyah-lat loved to drift up and down those wonderful rivers.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the beauty of the Burmese river banks; I should like to slip between them on such another boat. They lay on soft crÊpey cushions, did Theebaw and Soo-pyah-lat. They had dainty fare of green turtles’ eggs and esculent swallows’ nests; they ate strange salads made of the succulent stems of many aquatic plants and of shrubs; they dipped their jewelled fingers into big carved bowls of pickled tea; they skinned and ate odd Oriental fruits; they moored their glittering barge, and caught the big dates from off the graceful tamarind trees. Green and purple parrots whirled in the moonlight; and the blue jays winged their graceful way, haply unconscious that they must die to feather with their splendid azure the state robes of Chinese mandarins.

Perhaps they landed sometimes to wander hand in hand through the forests of priceless teak. Perhaps Soo-pyah-lat rejoiced in the immense masses of gorgeous yellow flowers, and in the huge leaves that measured twenty inches from stem to tip. Perchance they called their attendants to cut a hole in some huge oil tree, and light in it a fire, and watched the oil flow, that they might realise again how great in natural wealth Burmah was, and how spontaneously she yielded up her treasure to her sons. When the great tree—it was one hundred and eighty feet high, and its circumference was sixteen feet,—when it was emptied of its oil, it was split into long torches; and by their weird light the king and queen went back to their waiting boat.

Wherever Theebaw walked, over him was carried the great white umbrella. Umbrellas are the stars and garters of Burmah—the coats of arms—the insignia of rank. They are not carried as a protection against rain, but as a proclamation of degree. The white umbrella was sacred to Buddha and the king. Only over the head of a statue of the god and the head of the king could it be opened. To the princes of the blood-royal belonged the gold umbrella. And every class had its umbrella prescribed of shape and hue.

I do not know which is the more wonderful, the pagodas of Burmah or its creeping canes. The latter are sometimes three hundred feet long. They make splendid ropes; and out of them the deft Burmans and defter Chinese make all conceivable and many inconceivable things.

There are immensely valuable mines in Burmah whose locality was only known to Theebaw, his queen, and their few most trusted ministers. When Theebaw was conquered, just eight years ago, he did not betray the placement of those natural treasure stores. We have been hunting them ever since, but without success. It has been recently mooted that Theebaw might be induced to disclose to us their whereabouts. If the spirit of Soo-pyah-lat whispers in his ear, he will ask a big price for his knowledge.

ORIENTAL OBSEQUIES

Burmese Burials

The Burmese are very philosophical. They have no belief in another life; but they make the most of this one. They take everything very easily—everything but death; they hate to die. That is natural on the part of a people who enjoy life so thoroughly, and who live in such a pleasant, sunny land. I have seen a Burmese funeral train in a gale of merriment, but I have never seen a Burmese man or woman who was willing to die. They are not afraid of death; but they are unutterably saddened by it. The Burmese are a tender-hearted, affectionate race, and the most affecting deathbed parting I ever saw was between a Burmese man and his dying mother.

A Burmese village burns; the entire property—all the belongings of the inhabitants, are destroyed. The men set to work and build a theatre on the smouldering ruins; the women gather plantains from the nearest tree, until their silk tameins are full; the pretty Burmese children climb the trees and drop the yellow fruit down into their pretty mothers’ out-held garments; the men complete the impromptu theatre while the women roast the fruit. Then they eat, and wash their meal down with brook-water, with laughter, and with song; then they bathe their hands and lips in the nearest stream, which is sure not to be far away; then they have a theatrical performance; and so console themselves for the loss of their homes and their little earthly all. But, for the loss of a relative or a close friend they are never consoled. They grieve quietly—which is very un-Eastern—but they grieve persistently.

When a Burmese dies, messengers are at once sent to all his friends, no matter how far off those friends live. And all the friends hasten to bid farewell to the body, to arrange for the funeral, and to console—as best they may—the bereaved family. All the expenses of a Burmese funeral are met by voluntary gifts.

I have often thought the Burmese the cleanest people on earth; certainly they are the cleanest people in the East. They wash their dead with great care, and several times. The last water used is scented. The Burmese do not believe in immortality, and yet, like all of us who are disbelievers, in whatever part of the world we live, they fight their own unbelief, and, when death touches their near and dear, they indulge their hurt hearts with many a little ceremony inconsistent with their scepticism. For instance, they place in the mouth of their dead a little coin called “ferry hire.” They believe, or try to believe, that death is a river, and that the waterman requires pay. How the superstitions of the world repeat themselves! How the Greek imagination dominates the imaginations of all the gentler peoples.

The body is placed on an uncovered bier, which is laid just out of the house door. There it remains for three days; but it is never left alone. Then the body is laid in the coffin. The priests, looking very like copper-coloured Capuchins, come to conduct the dead to its last resting place.

PAGODA NEAR MANDALAY.         Page 88.

The funeral procession, unlike those of any other Eastern people, is formed largely of vehicles. The Burmese carts are very odd, and are fittingly picturesque adjuncts to the most graphically beautiful landscape in Asia. The carts are drawn by great, handsome oxen. They have two immense wheels, and an indescribable top. The back of the cart is curved. The Burmese perch themselves on the seat of their native vehicles in some mysterious way.

These carts form the first part of the funeral procession. They are decorated with queer primitive flags and flat paper umbrellas. The beautiful oxen are usually festooned with flowers; but when they are to be included in a funeral procession, the flowers are taken off them. This they often resent; for they are by no means devoid of vanity—these huge gentle oxen of the East.

After the waggons walk the priests, not less than twenty or thirty. They carry liver-shaped palm-leaf fans, and the umbrellas peculiar to their priesthood. They carry rosaries, as do all Chinese priests. The Burmese, who have many of the Mongolian features, always seemed to me to be the Chinese grown beautiful.

After the priests walk or ride the mourners. They are dressed in white.

Then comes the funeral cart. It is shaped like a house-boat. It is covered by a softly coloured silk canopy, and it bristles with umbrellas and pennants.

The close of the funeral procession is of a nondescript character. It is a catch-all for waggons, not en regale, for priests and friends crowded out of the procession proper, and for stragglers. By the time the procession reaches its destination, the irregular cortÉge behind the funeral cart is very apt to be twice or thrice the length of the regular cortÉge that precedes the carriage of the dead.

When the train halts, the coffin is lifted carefully from the waggon. It is placed upon the ground, on the spot designated by the priests. Then water is poured over the coffin, while the priests chant. The Burmese set great store by water. It is almost their only beverage; and water must be an important item in the daily life of a people of such exquisite neatness. They have a yearly Water Festival. It begins on New Year’s Day, and continues for nearly a week. At daybreak on New Year’s Day the Burmese go to the nearest of their wonderful pagodas. They throw water upon it, and pray for a plentiful season. A jar of water is presented, with great ceremony, to the head priest of the pagoda, and with a prayer that any wickedness they may have committed during the past year may be forgiven. Then they have a splendid romp. Most of the Eastern peoples play like children; and the Burmese are the most frolicsome race in the Orient. They drench each other with water; and he who gets wettest confidently expects the most good luck for the ensuing year. The missionaries say that this is a primitive expression of the theory of the cleansing of sin by water. It reminded me of the New Year’s customs of the Chinese. Every Chinaman, who possibly can, pays all his debts on New Year’s Day. What a festival for the Chinese tradespeople! It reminded me even more of a German habit. On New Year’s Day German friends who have quarrelled forgive each other. No Burmese feud can continue after the principals have drenched each other nicely with water at the Water Festival. The analogy would be more perfect if the Burmese were more quarrelsome or the Germans more peaceful. The Burmese very rarely quarrel among themselves.

After the pouring of water upon the coffin, alms are given to all the poor present. Then every one is given a dish of pickled tea (by the way, pickled tea is rather nice—far nicer than pickled cabbage). Other ceremonies follow—all of a quiet, dignified character. Then the body is burned—usually in the coffin. The funeral procession slowly wends its way back. The priests guard sacredly the smouldering pile. Three days later the relatives return and gather up the ashes. Very occasionally the ashes are put into urns; but as a rule they are buried.

That is a Burmese burial: the burial of human ashes.

On the tenth day after the burial a great feast is held in honour of the dead, and as an attempt at cheering the bereaved relatives. A Burmese feast is a very pretty sight. The meal is usually spread on a very low table, about which the diners sit—sit on the floor of course. Sometimes the meal is eaten out of doors. Then the bowls of food are arranged on the ground. The dishes are intertwined with strings of fragrant flowers. The Burmese string the blossoms of the sweetest of their flowers on long threads, and make slender, perfumed flower-ropes, which they wear about their necks, twist among their hair, hang over their doorways, and with which they decorate their tables.

Nothing could form a prettier picture than a number of Burmese in festival dress. Their flower-twined heads, their lithe, graceful bodies, deftly wrapped in delicately-hued silks, their sleeves of embroidered net, and their jackets of flowered velvet or of brocaded silk, are enhanced here and there by milky pearls, by curiously carved gold, by quaintly wrought silver, by softly blue turquoise, and mystic moonstones.

Rice is the mainstay of Eastern life. It forms the chief ingredient of every Burmese meal. The Burmese make delicious curry, but they eat less curry than the other Eastern races. They call their three principal meals “morning rice,” “noon rice,” and “evening rice.” A Burmese feast begins with “sea-swallows’ nests soup.” It is wonderfully nourishing. The people of Burmah are professed vegetarians. But I have eaten both fish and flesh when the guest of a Burmese lady, and I believe that both are eaten by all the people, not excepting the priests. Certainly elaborate meat and flesh dishes are conspicuous at a Burmese feast, and on every Burmese table are big jars of pickled tea. They serve an abundance of savoury yellow cakes and of fruit. They have a hot salad of cooked vegetables, including “ladies fingers,” “bringel,” tomatoes, and bamboo tips. There are only three courses in an ordinary funeral feast—1. Soup. 2. Meats, rice, vegetables, etc. 3. Cakes and fruit. Each viand is put on the table in one large bowl, out of which every one present eats (as you or I should have done had we lived in the time of Chaucer) with their fingers. While they eat, they drink a great deal of water. After they have washed their hands and lips they smoke. All the Burmese smoke—men, women, and children. I have seen a mother pacify a child, who cried for the breast at an inopportune moment, by giving him her cigar, and the baby made a rather successful attempt to puff it. The Burmese cigars are very large, but they are extremely mild. They are made of a large green native leaf. They are so gentle that I often wondered why the Burmese were so fond of them. Perhaps it is well that their cigars are so gentle and nicotinless, for the Burmese are the most inveterate smokers in the world.

ORIENTAL NUPTIALS

Burmese Bridals

In Burmah, marriage is not a failure; it is a stupendous success. The Burmese women are sweetly pretty. They have dainty ways and happy faces. It would be very ungrateful of them to be less than happy, for they hold a position unique among the women of the East. I know of but one other race of women who are upon so entire an equality, socially, legally, and financially, with men as are the Burmese women,—the American woman is as free as the Burmese woman, but no more so,—the best type of the most typically American women I mean. The women who are only half American, the women in whose families old European customs are family law, are not nearly so free as the pretty women-folk of Burmah.

There is no religious ceremony connected with a Burmese marriage. The Burmese do not—in theory at least—regard marriage as a blessing; and yet I know no other country in the world in which so overwhelming a proportion of marriages are extremely happy. I never knew a Burmese husband and wife to quarrel, and Europeans who have spent many years among the Burmese tell me that such quarrels are almost unknown. This may be, in part, because the Burmese are dowered with kind, easy-going, affectionate, faithful temperaments.

The Burmese are tenderly devoted to their children. A common love of little children cements many a broken marriage, strengthens many a real love—the world over. But I believe that the reason of reasons for the universality of happy marriages in Burmah is the sensible way in which marriage is undertaken and the just way in which it is carried out. We women of Europe cry out for enfranchisement—cry with shrill, sharp voices; and I fancy that the more liberty we get the more unfeminine we grow. In America, we are sadly spoiled, I fear. We have grown fond of cushions and of sweetmeats. The Burmese women teach an invaluable lesson—if the women of America and the women of Europe would learn it. They are on as absolute an equality with men as nature will permit. All the equality that man can give woman he has given her in Burmah; the women of Europe can not well ask for more. But if the women of Europe get all the equality that they want, will they wear it as delicately and with as much dignity as do the heathen women of Burmah? I fear not. The Burmese women are as graceful as the women of Japan; as gentle, as lovable as the women of Denmark; as vivacious as the women of France; as capable as the women of America, and as feminine as the women of England at their best: the women who do not aspire to do man’s work and neglect their own. The women of Burmah accept gracefully the limitations of nature,—that is the great, great lesson they can teach the women of England. The limitless consideration of the Burmese men for the Burmese women has not enervated the women of Burmah. The Burmese women, though they never bustle, are never loud-mouthed, are never slovenly, yet are—within reasonable, intelligent limits—the most energetic, the most industrious women in the world. Petting has not spoiled the women of Burmah. That is the great, great lesson they have for the women of America.

The marriage yoke rests as easily upon the Burmese necks as a wreath of roses—for the man and wife pull equally, pull together. Each does his or her fair part. Each remembers always the rights of the other. Courtesy and justice are big ingredients in Burmese married life. Small wonder that in Burmah marriage is a big success.

If the position of the Burmese women is unique, the position of the Burmese children is unparalleled and almost indescribable. Filial piety is almost as much a matter of religion in Burmah as in China. On the other hand, parental coercion is more unknown in Burmah than in the United States. Burmese children never disobey, but Burmese parents almost never command; family affection is very strong in Burmah. But the law of love is the only law known in the home circle. When a girl reaches a marriageable age—when she has reached young-womanhood and feels inclined for the greater womanhood of marriage—she very simply places a light in her own particular casement; then the would-be Benedicts gather about her. Night after night they “call.” Night after night she and her parents receive them. The Burmese women are always most careful in their toilets; but at this period their care becomes superlative. The Burmese women are always pretty; their taste in dress is exquisite; and when a Burmese maiden lights the invitational lamp and sits down to await her suitors, she makes a picture of pretty humanity, of which we women of Europe may well be envious.

“Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.” I wonder if that is true. It is musical, it is big with poetry. It pointed a great truth as Tennyson wrote it. It fell from his pen a truth. But take it alone, tear it from its high place in English literature; of itself, by itself, is it true? I have doubts, petty perhaps, but forcibly pertinacious. The marriage question—that El Dorado of the farthing-a-liners—Ah! there is no marriage question in Cathay. The women of the East are married, and they find their happiness in marriage—they never analyse it. They know as little of elective affinities and of natural selection as do the perfumed flowers of the Orient. Perhaps they know as much. It is a very fine thing to discuss marriage in all its imperfections, it is far finer to experience it in all its perfection. And the women of the Orient, who never talk of marriage because they are not enough advanced, experience it and seem to find it rather perfect. What has the world given women, what has civilisation, education, given them; what can life give them better than marriage? Nothing! The past gave us nothing, the present gives us nothing, and in the mysterious bosom of the future lies for us no greater benison than marriage. Sneer senseless men and unsexed women, but that is truth, Nature’s greatest truth!

The Burmese maiden who desires marriage, and tells it through her pretty lamp, is not over bold, nor does she seem so to her countrymen. The Burmese regard marriage as so much a woman’s greatest right—they so entirely believe it to be her highest and best career—that the girl who announces her readiness for marriage is neither ashamed nor shamed. Let us look at her for a moment as she sits quietly within her father’s doorway. Her lamp is lit. The suitors are coming. Yes, she is vastly pretty. Her long black hair is quaintly, carefully, but not grotesquely dressed; it is softly perfumed, and fresh, dewy flowers rest amid its silken coils. Every feature is pretty, but prettiest are her dainty ears and her small hands and feet. In her ears gleam twin pearls and rubies, and her little hands are heavy with the same gems. The people of the East are peculiarly fond of pearls. The fondness culminates in China. The pearls of the world are worn by the beauties of Canton and Pekin. The Burmese have all the fine tastes of the Chinese, and none of their personal ugliness. The women of Burmah wear pearls less profusely than do the women of China, but they become them more. Mah Me wears a petticoat, a graceful silken petticoat. It has been woven in a Burmese loom. The colours are bright and varied, but they are matchlessly blended, and the pattern is as exquisite as it is Oriental. An outer skirt (indeed it is a straight piece of soft silk) falls above the petticoat. It is a soft, bright pink, it is striped with dull, dark colours, and with gold and silver threads. It falls behind Mah Me in a pretty demi-train way. Under her arms is folded a broad band of red silk; it forms a pretty, simple, bodice and keeps in place the pretty, simple skirts. A sheer muslin jacket covers her shoulders and her upper arms. It is open from her bosom. She half wears, half carries, a blue and silver shawl. Her soft brown neck is modestly covered by chains of purest gold, in which glitter the gems of Burmah—gems dug from the invaluable mines for which we are so eagerly looking.

Mah Me is smoking a big Burmese cigar. The Burmese cigars look very formidable, but in reality they are the mildest of weeds. But the Burmans are devoted to them, and only cease to smoke when they sleep. To-night is her first night “at home to suitors.” A dozen or more will probably come. She will give them pickled tea, and they will chat and sing and play upon their tinkling native instruments. Every Burman is a musician, skilful and inveterate, if somewhat primitive. The Burmese, unlike the other Oriental peoples, do not drink tea, they eat it. I dislike tea as a beverage, but I liked it as a viand. The Burmese pickle it with oil and garlic. As rice is the staff of Burmese life, so is pickled tea the dish of Burmese ceremony; so Mah Me gives her suitors pickled tea. Night after night they come, until she smiles on one more than on his fellows, then their ranks thin; the favoured remains, the others go; the betrothal is accomplished; the mothers of the young couple confer; the bridegroom presents his bride with a dowry; the marriage is celebrated by a feast; the bride and bridegroom sit side by side and eat from one dish. No marriage ceremony could be simpler, none could be more significant. On the marriage night, the friends who have partaken of the marriage feast pelt the house with stones. This musicless serenade is kept up for an incredible time, but the silence and the dark come at last, and the young husband and wife drift quietly into the happiness of peaceful Burmese married life.

I have sometimes thought, when looking at the Burmese women, that perhaps one secret of the constant affection of the Burmese husbands was the constant neatness of the Burmese wives. No one, I believe, has ever seen a Burmese woman untidy; their persons and their garments are always fresh, bright, and spotless.

Some one asked me recently, “what about divorce in Burmah?” I never heard of divorce in Burmah. I am not, of course, prepared to say that there is no such thing; but certainly it is very rare. When it is necessary, I daresay they deal with it as simply and as sensibly as they do with marriage. But the only divorce of which they are very generally cognisant is the great divorce, the divorce decreed by death.

We have conquered the Burmese; true, but they have conquered the marriage question, they have solved it,—they have conquered it and solved it without knowing of its existence. They are heathens; true, but they are happy in their home lives. May they never learn the weird Western secret of marital misery. There is much for us to learn in the Orient, but none of it is more important than the beautiful lesson of married happiness that is taught by Burmah. There is much in Burmah that is most imperfect, but in the relative positions of the sexes it is ideal.

A JAUNT IN A HOUSE-BOAT—THROUGH THE HOME OF THE WILD WHITE ROSE

I have been lying in a steamer chair, in which I have crossed half the large bodies of water in the world, and trying to recall the absolute stillness of the night I drove from the theatre in Shanghai to the canal up which we were going into China,—Chinese China, I mean; not semi-European China! Nothing moved. The crunching of our carriage wheels was the only sound we heard. The pungent Chinese flowers scented the air, and the clear moonlight brocaded the white ground with sharp black shadows of the blue wistarias.

Many weeks’ hard work was over. We had been playing bravely through the hot Chinese summer; now we were going to have a rest. This was one of our delightful little vacations, all the sweeter for being stolen, as they almost invariably were; and to which I look back as the Swiss going into exile looks back to the high white peaks of his native mountains. We can recall several years very full of hard work. But we can also recall days of rest we snatched from our own busy life as it rushed by us—days when we were free and breathed new air.

China is intersected with canals, as an oak leaf is netted with veins. Every primitive people has its favourite mode of travel. The travelling Chinaman goes in a house-boat, a junk, or a sampan; and the European who would pierce beyond the outer edge of China must adopt the Chinaman’s method of journeying,—there is no other way to get into China.

A delightful fellow, who lived in Shanghai, was supping with us one night. My husband spoke of my mania for seeing queer places, and told how I had gone in Hong-Kong where no European woman had been before me; of how I had gone into the Burra Bazaar in Calcutta at midnight, and told of a hundred other follies, for which I had been soundly scolded at the time, but which I had thoroughly enjoyed, and remember with considerable pleasure.

Mr. Brown said, “Would you like to go in a house-boat up one of the canals into Chinese China, where Europeans almost never go?”

I was overjoyed at the suggestion. There were two difficulties in our way, but woman-like I ignored them, and man-like they overcame them. The first difficulty was that we were playing six nights a week, and the second was that the house-boat was very small and had only one cabin. My husband agreed to give our company a short holiday. Mr. Brown suggested that they two could sleep on deck, or if it turned cold, a curtain could be stretched across the tiny cabin. We were to go, and I was happy.

It was about one in the morning when we reached the boat. It was a funny little bark, and looked as if it had been carved from a big Chinese nut. The moonlight was so bright that we could see the faces of the scantily clad coolies who lay on the deck. They were our sailors. There were only two servants, the cook and Mr. Brown’s “boy,” who was to act as butler and general factotum. They stood waiting for us, their bare feet hidden by the coarse Chinese grass that grew on the banks, their long cues beautifully braided and finished with red cotton, and their long blue garments (for all the world like pinafores) new laundried.

I was asked once more if I were afraid—if I really wanted to go; then our carriage turned back, and we went on board.

The sailors undid our moorings. They took up their long poles, and we moved on through the moonlit darkness. We stood on deck a few moments before we went down to supper. We were alone with the night, and with China. I leaned over the rail and felt that I was the only European woman in China; those in Shanghai and in Hong-Kong didn’t count, no, nor even those in Sha-mien. But I was in China, and I was going up, up into the forbidden country.

Mr. Brown made me go below. What a capital host he was; and what a funny little cabin. There was a table a little smaller than that at which I’m writing, and there were seats round the cabin’s sides, a bunk at one end, and that was all. No not all: there were red curtains at the windows; there were cushions on the seats; there were satin heaps of eider down on the one bunk (my bunk); there was a vase of flowers; and Ah Loon was bringing in the supper.

We had a pigeon pie that would have done credit to the Langham; we had an omelet in which the blessed cook had stirred pÂtÉ de foie gras; we had anchovy sandwiches and salad. The men sipped whisky and water as men will, and I had some champagne. We had some easy talk, but not for long. Two of us were tired, so after going on deck for one more look at the moon-bathed shore and the queer sailors, I said “good-night” and went below. Ah Loon had taken away the supper and pulled down the little red curtains. He had dived into my bag and laid out my kimono. I put it on, pulled up the curtains, put out the lights, and climbed into my throne-like bed. Yes; and I was as happy as a queen!

I have found that natives and monkeys warm to one who goes among them fearlessly. And then it would have meant such bitter reckoning for those sailors if any ill thing had befallen us. The night was still, the moonlight accented everything, but no leaf moved. Two sounds broke the stillness now and again. As we passed some temple the tom-toms clashed out the brazen prayer of the priest who was spending the night in worship; then as we passed some other boat, our boatmen cried out, in Chinese, “Make way, make way for us; we have distinguished foreigners aboard.” I tucked the eider down more cosily about me and sank back, drowsy with the delicious luxury of being called a “distinguished foreigner.” A sweet, mild smell of tobacco came from the deck like a last good-night from my husband and our host. I dozed, then I woke to feel a faint perfume creep across my face, it was my welcome into China; it was the scent of the wild white rose.

When I woke in the morning Ah Loon was brightening the cabin with Oriental disregard of narrow European bedchamber sanctities.

“You sleep wellie?” he said. “I bling you tea decky or you dlinky in bedie? They gone decky, they done washie.”

I had my tea in bed, and then I induced him to leave the room. The cabin was sweet with yellow jasmine. One of the sailors had swam ashore to pull it. I dressed myself, but my boots were gone. I found them in the cook-house with Ah Loon. He refused to part with them. So I had to take him back to the cabin and let him button them for me. He wanted to “dlessie” my “hailie” but I postponed that.

All day we went on through panoramaed details of Chinese life. In one place big-leaved tobacco plants grew almost to the canal’s edge. The coolies who were cultivating the field rested from their work to look at us. It was quite a shock to me to see tobacco untended by American darkies. A sudden shower drove us below, and made the coolies bundle into their odd rain-coats. These garments are made of long, coarse grass. They make one think of the old nursery rhyme, “The beggars are come to town,” but they keep their wearers dry and they are very light.

Breakfast was ready. The French and the Chinese make the best coffee in the world. The Chinese are excellent cooks; ours had been borrowed from the “Shanghai Club,” and he was, what it is a crime for a cook not to be, an artist. He had done some delightful things with fresh fish, and he had made a suprÊme of chicken breasts in which tomatoes, mushrooms, and olives were mingled with the happiest result. The Chinese fruits (of course we ended our meal with fruit) are delicious. And you can’t eat them out of China. They are as pertinacious in their love of home as the Chinamen themselves. You can buy liches at Covent Garden—dried liches, but they are no more like the big pink-green fruit you eat in China than the toy pagoda you buy at the Lowther Arcade is like the great pagoda at Canton. After breakfast I went and tried to make friends with the cook. He was crouching over a little naphtha stove. The weird, blue flame made the six feet by seven kitchen look like a baby “Blue Grotto” and it threw a purple haze about yellow Yen Yang that turned him into a picturesque demon. He failed to make me over-welcome, and the sickly smell of the naphtha disgusted me; so I went back to the cabin.

The rain was over. We went on deck. We were just in time to see a dozen or more Chinamen of the better class clustered about the base of an old Pagoda. “Loong Hwa” it was called I think, and it had a long interesting history. We passed acres and acres of rice, in different stages of growth. In many of the fields men, women, and children stood knee deep in the water without which the young rice won’t grow. Then we passed through a strange crowded city. The “Soochow” canal, on which we were, seemed to be the city’s principal street. Shops and houses were huddled together indiscriminately. All were open to the view of passers-by, and all were swarming with life. The buildings were of brick, of mud, of wood, and of bamboo. The roofs, which were invariably peaked, were covered with anything and everything; matting, broken flower pots, grass, tiles, and fifty other materials. On half the roofs children were playing or sleeping. Outside a shop, in which a “red button mandarin” was making a purchase, waited his little body-guard of seven soldiers; six of them carried round bamboo shields, and one bore his flag. We passed a famous Chinese temple and paused a little to study a wonderful idol on the outer wall. It was in bas relief, and tinted with every colour on the Chinese palette.

All that day and all the next—all that night and all the next—we went on through “that old world which was to us the new.” I have not space for even passing mention of half the wonders I saw. My pen must skip much that I shall always remember. But I must not omit a passing description of our wine-cellar. Three ropes trailed behind our house-boat. They hung low in the water—one was weighted with a bottle of beer; one was heavy with a bottle of claret; and one sunk deep in the cool stream because a bottle of champagne was tied to it. It was the duty of a half-grown Chinese boy to watch those ropes, and to watch a grass bag filled with bottles of soda-water which hung over one side. When a bottle was pulled in, another replaced it; and all our drink was beautifully cool.

On the third morning we landed. I had to walk across a thick bamboo pole, which they threw from the deck to the bank. I toddled like a “small-footed” woman of the best Chinese society; and I should have fallen had not Mr. Brown on shore and my husband on the boat, held the two ends of a tightly stretched-rope. I steadied myself by holding to it with one hand. And I stood in China!

We had a long walk before us—a walk up to where Rome sat enthroned on the Chinese hills; for we were going to a cathedral presided over by an eminent Roman Catholic prelate. We had gone about a quarter of a mile, climbing over rocks, breaking through tangling flowers and shrubs, when we came upon a sea of perfumed beauty. We had reached the home of the wild white rose.

Eighteen years before, at Heidelberg, my father found and gave me a wild white rose. It was the first wild white rose we had ever seen, and, though William Black tells of wild white roses in England, my father never saw another. Now I saw a wilderness of wild white roses at my feet. They lay like unmelting snow-flakes on the breast of the Chinese summer. We went on, up the hills. We passed through three or four Chinese farmyards. No one molested us, and they scarcely looked at us, though Europeans were almost unknown there. Chinese dignity is imperturbable.

I grew tired. A woman who was hulling corn gave me a glass of milk. But when my two comrades intimated that they too were tired and thirsty, she shook her head and frowned. Who shall say that the women of the Orient are not emancipated?

Half-way up the hill we stopped and looked across China. Green—green—green! Rice—rice—rice! The food of the nation was growing on the land of the people. Every known and unknown shade of green was there. The boundaries of each farm were cleanly outlined; and in the atmosphere, as clear as that of Italy, we could see for miles and miles; far in the distance the green fields and the blue sky melted into each other—making by their mingling a lovely indescribable gray.

We had reached a little chapel. Over the doorway was a crucifix. On the hill above stood a white cathedral. It would have adorned any street in Paris or Vienna; and the great gold cross that tipped it flashed like intersecting rainbows in the noon-day sun.

We waited in the chapel while our cards were sent up to the fathers. The walls were hung with Scriptural texts (in Chinese characters) and Biblical illustrations from a Mongolian point of view. Joseph, and a greater than Joseph, wore “pigtails,” and Mary had “little feet,” and the ample trousers of a Chinese woman. I have noticed all over the world that the Church of Rome is very wise in her concessions to the peoples she would convert. She adapts her teachings to the language her hearers can easiest understand.

Our messenger came back. The fathers were in retreat, and of course could not see us; least of all could they see me. But the head of their order kindly sent me down his “chair,” and two coolies to carry me up to the cathedral. I appreciated that courtesy, before we reached the top; for my husband and our friend found the climb very hard. The steep steps were cut in the rock in a manner typical of the Journey to the Cross. The first set of steps bore upward to the right; then a rude shrine was cut in the rocks. That represented the first station. The next set of steps bore upward to the left; then another niche represented the second station. The third set of steps bore upward to the right; the fourth bore upward to the left. There were twelve sets of steps, and at the end of each a holy lamp burned in front of a niche frescoed with the pictures that you will find in every illustrated Roman Catholic prayer-book. From the last station three broad, easy steps led into the beautiful cathedral. There were no pews; mats lay upon the mosaic floor. The huge building was empty. At the door the marble basins held holy water unrippled by devout fingers. The altar-piece was wonderfully fine, and reminded me of the admirable figure of Mary on the high altar of the cathedral in Montreal.

We lingered a long time in the cool, vacant fane, speaking in hushed tones of the vast enterprise of Rome. Her priests have made practically no converts in China; and they know it. But they persist. They spare no expense, count no cost of life; because they believe that in after generations they shall have so permeated Chinese life with Roman Catholic thought that real conversion of the Chinese may be possible. I am not a Roman Catholic; but the longer I live—the farther I travel—the more deeply I respect the Church of Rome. She sent her Sisters of Charity into the battlefields of old Europe; she has encouraged art and literature when, but for her, they must have perished; and her pioneers press always in the advance guard of civilisation.

It was sunset when we returned to our house-boat. We seized upon the dinner table. I had had a glass of milk since breakfast, and the hospitable priests had sent us a light lunch into their outer garden; but we had climbed eight miles at least; the men had walked up and down the long, steep steps leading to the cathedral; and we were very hungry.

We went on deck for coffee. We had begun our return journey. I tried to paint the sunset. How I failed! Red melted into orange, and warm violet faded to cold green, before I could fix either to my half liking. A few miles down, the canal widened into a lake. We waited there a little to watch some novel fishing. On the centre of the lake were three or four motionless sampans; in each were two or three Chinamen; but the fishermen were huge cormorants. Each man had two birds; each bird was fastened, by one foot, to a long string, the other end of which was secured to the Chinaman’s wrist; each bird had a metal ring about his throat, to prevent his swallowing the fish he caught. The birds sat on the edge of the sampans, peering intently into the water. Suddenly one would plunge into the water, coming up almost instantly, with a silver fish gleaming in its cruel beak. The cormorants never made a mistake. It was only after a fierce fight that they could be made to relinquish their prey; and the men who had them in charge had many a torn finger. When the boats were full, the men poled to the shore. The birds were carried some distance from the sampans; the rings were taken from their necks; and they were given a few of the fish they had been used to catch. I have seen few sights more weird, more distinctively odd, than the fishing cormorants of China.

An hour later—it was still bright and light—we passed through a Chinese town. A high picturesque bridge that spanned the canal was teeming with people. It was the Chinese hour of rest; the Chinese (the busiest people on the globe) were doing nothing but enjoying themselves. They were all talking—their language is never musical, but it is characteristic.

I have heard a great deal of Chinese antagonism to Europeans; I have never witnessed it. Friends have told me of hair-breadth escapes from Chinese mobs, and of loathsomely insulting language to which they have been subjected by the Chinese. My experience has been quite to the contrary. I have traversed the length and breadth of the island of Hong-Kong alone, but for my ’rickshaw coolie. I have gone down into the depths of old Shanghai; and I have stood, one of three Europeans, in the midst of ten thousand Cantonese, and I have received courteous kindness—nothing else. I have had them laugh at me. A woman in Canton crept up to me and felt the strange European texture of my dress; a woman in Shanghai begged a glove from me—giving me a ring in return. I have had presents, unsolicited and unrequited, from almost every class of Chinese. As we passed beneath the big red bridge, a girl leaned over the parapet and threw a bunch of sweet-briar into my lap. In reporting my days in China, I must report unbroken kindness; for no grown woman can be expected to count the fact that, as she sat on the deck of a house-boat, half-a-dozen Chinese urchins called out, “La-le-lung! La-le-lung!” That means a thief, a liar, and something else as complimentary. And one boy called after us, “Fankwai!” which means foreign devil. But the delightful frankness of the small boy is too world-wide to be laid at the door of China; and to me a small boy is the most delicious animal in the wide world; and I can forgive him sins much more grievous than calling me a “foreign devil.”

We didn’t land where we had embarked a few nights before. We kept on down through the entrance to the Soochow creek. There the native houses, with their queerly ventilated walls, clustered in indescribable confusion. The roof of every Chinese building is peaked liked the prow of an ancient ship. I have often wished for leisure to study Chinese architecture, the few theories I have heard about its peculiarities are so interesting.

We forced our way through a multitude of native boats, out into the fresh breezes of the open water,—we were in the river. We made for the harbour.

We were back in Shanghai; our happy holiday was over. I shall always hold Mr. Brown’s memory very blessed; and remember as one of the most pleasant and unique experiences of my life our jaunt in a house-boat through the home of the Wild White Rose.

AN OPIUM DEN IN SHANGHAI

There are two Shanghais. New Shanghai is under the control of three Western powers. Over one section of it floats the French Tricolour; over another part waves the Stars and Stripes of the United States; above the third flies the Union Jack. The Chinese who live in New Shanghai are more or less Europeanised; they speak “pidgen” English or a quaint burlesque French. They adapt themselves to their pale neighbours—in many ways, I have eaten in Shanghai with a Chinaman who was deft in his use of knife and fork. The opium “joints” of New Shanghai are not typical Chinese opium houses any more than if they were in “China-town” in San Francisco or in Melbourne. They are so modified for the convenience of their European habituÉs that, at the most, they are but half Mongolian.

In Old Shanghai it is all very different. Drive a few miles—a very few—from the luxurious European Club; leave your carriage when you come to a bamboo bridge it may not cross; pass over that bridge; go through the gate-way of the old city wall; and you are in China!—real China!—old China, where ancient customs hold their own; where nothing changes. You pass through that gate by sufferance. Don’t swagger down those dirty narrow streets. The flag that tops your consulate casts no protecting shadow here.

At night, Old Shanghai is shut to Europeans. But we went there one night, armed with especial permission, and escorted by three white-button mandarins; and, perhaps I ought to add, forbidden by our Consul.

We saw several opium dens. They varied in their degrees of luxury, but they were all alike in being vastly unlike anything we had seen in New Shanghai or in Occidental “China-towns.”

In the humblest of the “joints” we visited in Old Shanghai, on trestles, some made of wood, some made of bamboo, lay long boards; every alternate trestle was higher than those next it; this made an incline. The smokers lay on these inclined boards, their heads at the higher ends, their feet at the lower; under their heads were hard, small, native pillows; and between each two smokers was placed a small bamboo cabinet that held the impedimenta of their dissipation.

Is opium smoking a dissipation? Yes—if it is smoked to excess, and at the wrong time. But I have lived too long in the East not to feel that opium has a place—an essential place—in the economy of the Orient. That we should wean Asia from the use of opium is impossible; that we are trying, is preposterous; worst of all, we are making ourselves ridiculous.

The opium den was quiet and decorous. The air was heavy with a peculiar, pleasant sweetness. The smokers were in different stages of the opium pleasure; but they were all well-behaved and inoffensive. Would they have been so had whisky been the form of their indulgence? In a few hours they would resume the heavy burdens of their poverty-stricken lives, rested but not enervated. Gin would not have left them so unharmed!

The outer room, through which we had passed, was of course devoted to gambling. The Chinaman stimulates his intellect as much by his incessant playing of intricate games of chance as he stupefies it by his frequent use of opium.

I have been asked if Chinese women smoke. I believe that they do,—very much as European women smoke. Their smoking of opium is by no means universal, nor do they smoke it to excess, nor in its strength. When the feet of the small-footed women are being bound, I believe that they use opium rather more than at other times.

That the national use of opium has not dulled the national intellect must be the testimony of every truthful European who has ever tried to get the better, in a bargain, of a Chinese man, woman, or child. That the national use of opium has undermined the national health surely will be said by no one who has gone through China with eyes half open.

As we drove home, I felt that we had in no way been “slumming”; but rather that we had been peeping at the interesting real life of a wonderful people.

Our Consul gave us marrow-bones for supper, and said to me—“You will burrow once too often into the bowels of the Orient”; but I never did.

I know nothing of the great international issues staked upon England’s ultimate answer to the Opium Question. I am too lazy (or too wise) to attempt the quick solving of a problem that has baffled many a wise man throughout a lifetime. But I know something of the human interests at stake; and humanitarianism is so much more than internationalism that I venture to speak re this well-worn subject.

Opium has been a great blessing to Asia, and is so now. True, it is sometimes used to excess in the East. Here, I have known Englishmen to make themselves very ill by over-consumption of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding; Italian noblemen have grown gross from repeated over-feeds of macaroni; Italian peasants have become disgustingly fat on black bread and garlic.

Some Chinamen, some Indians, use too much opium; but (we must bear in mind the enormous populations of both countries) they are the exceptions, not the rule. The people of the East are naturally moderate. They are languid, and languor does nothing to excess. In India, in the Straits Settlements, or in China, a coolie goes bravely to work, after an enormous meal of rice and curry. Curry is a positive stimulant, a non-intoxicant stimulant! After some hours the coolie feels a little less like work; but his work is not half done. He thrusts his hand into one of the many mysterious recesses of his dirty loin cloth; he draws forth a yellowish ball, about the size of a wickedly big pill. It is not opium, but it contains opium. He thrusts it beneath his tongue. He does not grow sleepy; he does not grow momentarily less intelligent; but his work grows lighter. His evening-rice does not seem so sadly far off. The opium ball (ball tinged with opium, to speak correctly rather than colloquially)—the opium ball has made his flesh as strong temporarily as his patient Oriental spirit is always willing. The effect of the opium passes away. His work is over. His curry and rice is ready. He goes home to it, and to his gentle, meek, contented womankind, no jot the worse for his little indulgence. Had he worked on with tingling nerves, and trembling limbs, and craving stomach, he would have been in a miserable state physically.

Again, I acknowledge that the people of the East sometimes take opium in injurious and disgraceful quantities, but they are an infinitesimal proportion. Here in Europe people occasionally select the pleasantest means of committing suicide, and lull themselves into eternal slumber with chloroform. For their silly sakes (I might say brave sakes, did I care to deal with two controversies at once)—for their sakes shall we do away with chloroform, and make the operating rooms of our hospitals the hells of horrors they were sixty years ago?

It has often been in my heart to advocate the moderate use of opium for our own working classes. I have not done so for three reasons. In the first place I am an unknown woman with an unestablished pen. Who would listen to me merely because I love Asia and wish Europe well? Secondly, I am a moral coward; I shrink from the contumely of my own people. Last of all, and most of all, I doubt if our poor could be so trusted, as can the people of the Orient, with a drug which is blessing or curse as it is wisely or unwisely used. Self-denial has become by long usage second nature to the children of the East. Our Anglo-Saxon poor drain their pewter mugs to the dregs.

The other day at the British Museum, when searching for exact and reliable information on a nice point of Oriental law, I had the misfortune to come across a maudlin book written by a missionary. I condemn the book, not because of its author’s calling, but because it was written in a narrow spirit, and in dense ignorance of the subject embodied in its title. Among other things calculated to rather startle one who knows the East and loves it, the writer gravely proposed that we should subjugate “wicked China” by influencing the Chinese to a much larger use of opium. In Europe the victims of nameless crimes are sometimes drugged into drunken acquiescence; but I am sure that most Christians would advocate a conversion of the heathen more intelligently voluntary on the part of the converts.

Let us speak the truth about Asia or be silent; let us be just to India at least. There are many subjects vitally important to Her Majesty’s brown people, subjects intimately connected with their home lives and their physical well-being, of which most of us know nothing. If we are too indolent or too indifferent to inform ourselves on those subjects in the only adequate way—I mean by a long, studious, and sympathetic residence in India—why then, in the great name of humanity and the name of Anglo-Saxon justice, let us leave bad enough alone.

There are two classes of men who should not be allowed to write, or at all events to print. In our profession we always know that a company has fallen upon very hard times indeed when His Majesty the stage manager is cast for a part. There are analogous reasons and as strong why an editor should never dip his pen into the ink-filled well save to write, “Returned with thanks,” or “Please reduce this charming article from three columns to one.”

Re writing editors, I have said as much as I dare. “Re writing” missionaries, please let me speak. Why are they missionaries? What do they as missionaries accomplish? I have not devoted enough time to either question, nor have I asked those questions with enough sympathy, to feel justified in answering. The nineteenth century must work out its own salvation if it can, and the overplus of Anglo-Saxon population must find relief and breathing room in many a foreign clime, and through the channel of many a debatable occupation.

I am dumb before the mass of missionaries and the missionary question. But against the missionaries who write, not narrow tracts, but unnecessary and incorrect essays on Eastern peoples and customs, I now and here wage war.

A missionary goes to Asia, perhaps to sacrifice his life, perhaps to better his condition. In one thing at least he is sincere—in his condemnation of the religions of the East. Of these religions he knows nothing; but the missionary is not perhaps quite so unreasonable as he appears, for he expects the “native” to accept Christianity as blindly and as ignorantly as he himself condemns Buddhism, Confucianism, and a hundred other creeds of which he does not even know the names. I do not blame the missionary; we all think as keenly as we can, and our thought is only limited by our circumstances and our capacity.

My quarrel with the missionary is a personal one. I protest against his ignorance of modes Oriental being perpetuated in type.

I am reading now in the British Museum,—reading to increase my knowledge of the hemisphere I love. I select from the catalogue thirteen books. I go to my seat, the books are brought; twelve are written by missionaries, and they abound in statements so preposterously inaccurate that even my partial information balks at them.

The man who devotes his life to the study of microbes does not attempt, when he retires from active practice, to crown his life’s work by writing an exhaustive treatise on the Law of Evidence. A great Q.C. rarely spends his old age in the authorship of a book on hip-disease. We live in an age of specialists; but the missionary, at least the literary missionary, is a man apart,—he deals in generalities, and they don’t even glitter.

I came across a book the other day, or rather it came across me. It had been written by a most estimable man, and it was a most wonderful and ingenious jumble of lapidarian lore, of geological research, and of the history of Christianity in Ceylon. It was a book supremely calculated to exasperate an enthusiastic lapidarian who was indifferent to things sacred; but then, of course, such a man requires exasperating. But it occurred to me that it might be equally calculated to embarrass and puzzle the devout reader who was more religiously minded than generally well-informed.

I am not jibing at missionaries. Some of the most charming people that I have met in India were missionaries; and though we radically differed in much that was to them of the first importance, I found every cause to respect their intelligence, their mentalities, and their lives.

I spent a good deal of time in the Leper Asylum at Subathu, and learned a vast deal from the missionary in charge of it, and from his wife. What a book of intense interest they could write!—for I am sure that they have too much character to write about what they do not understand; I am sure that they have too much literary good taste to make a heterogeneous mixture of theology and irrelevant Orientalism. They both write well, for I have had charming letters from them both.

But the literary missionary per se—the man who knows superficially one thing and writes books about everything—he ought to be extinguished.

MEMORIES OF HONG-KONG

Hong-Kong exemplifies the national reserve of two great nations. Hong-Kong is the home of countless Chinamen, and the residence of many Englishmen, but the two know little of each other.

After having lived for some months in Hong-Kong, I have concluded that there are no two nations, one Oriental and the other Occidental, that so closely resemble each other as do the English and the Chinese. Englishmen are intensely Western; Chinamen are intensely Eastern. But those are, after all, merely matters involving local colour. Local colour affects the details of daily national life, but does not necessarily destroy or create great basic race characteristics.

Chinamen and Englishmen have, in common, indefatigable industry, indomitable courage, unswerving perseverance, reticence, pride, fidelity to a bargain, love of law and order, faith in the old, mistrust of the new. Both love horses; both were originally hunters; both indulge in games of chance—sometimes too often; both are respecters of rank; both venerate genius; both are considerate of women and children; both have produced great and enduring literatures; both have developed science; both resent the slightest encroachment upon their rights—individual or national; both are slow to anger and slower to forgive; both lack a supreme taste in dress; and in a hundred other ways they resemble each other.

The English race is painted on the canvas of life with stern reliable grays; the Chinese race is painted with dull serviceable blues. The Chinese have the advantage of the more vivid, picture-like background.

Nature is brilliant and aggressive in China. Chinese architecture is fantastic and often crude. But both are softened. The bold, bright scenery is made lovely and almost gentle by endless trails of dainty vines, great clumps and long lines of feathery bamboo, fields of wild white roses, and ragged masses of chrysanthemums. The grotesque Mongolian architecture is toned to beauty and fitness by its antiquity, and by its quaint tent-like outlines.

There is no city in the world more beautifully situated than Hong-Kong. As a matter of fact, there is no city named Hong-Kong, but there is a city called Hong-Kong. The island is named Hong-Kong, and its one city is named Victoria, but it is always called Hong-Kong. It is so much more rational to call a Chinese city by a Chinese rather than an English name—even though the English flag waves over it—that we may adopt the custom and forget the fact.

“The Peak” crowns Hong-Kong naturally and socially. The beauty of the island culminates where the huge ferns break again the lovely broken outlines of the Peak, and the blue sky backgrounds with topaz the big green fronds. The European Élite of the island lives as near the Peak as it can, and descends in its coolie-borne chair to the streets and byways of Hong-Kong. The Peak is the climatic salvation of European life in Hong-Kong. When the heat of Hong-Kong the lowly is not to be endured of European vitalities, why then the Europeans of lower Hong-Kong reverse the action of Hong-Kong’s Élite. The dwellers in Hong-Kong the lower ascend to the Peak, where it is always delightfully comfortable, invigoratingly cool. But they do not, as a rule, come up in chairs—the middle-class Anglo-Hong-Kongians; they come up on the cable railway, which is far quicker, and only costs, if I remember, ten sen!

But there is one more word to be said in praise of the Peak. Europeans can boast of three gastronomic achievements in Asia. The hotels in the East are, as a rule, bad; but there are a few exceptions; and of those few, three are Bonifaced by Europeans. A dear old American darky presides smilingly over a capital hotel on the Peak.

It poured when we first reached Hong-Kong. But I am always delighted to get on to firm land—even if it is rain-soaked and muddy.

The chattering coolies and a thousand sampans swarmed about our ship. The sampans seemed scrupulously clean and were indescribably quaint. Women stood in them and propelled them, using in a masterly way long bamboo poles. The women wore full blue trousers, and black sack-like long-skirted coats that shone like oilcloth. They all wore ear-rings and bracelets of jade. The men wore their droll rain-coats and conical-shaped hats that had immense brims and were made of bamboo splints. They jabbered like magpies; and the scene was infinitely more Chinese than any I had seen in the harbour at Shanghai. Soon a business-like little tug came alongside, with Mr. Paulding standing smiling in the prow. He had a nice new umbrella and a very nice new hat. I never remember arriving at a new point in our Eastern journeyings and being met by Mr. Paulding minus a new hat. It was his one mania, and a very harmless one; but I believe it more than once provoked his Madrassi boy to tears. Mr. Paulding could never be induced to part with one of his hats, nor to allow them to be roughly stowed away with the heavy luggage. Sam used to look both picturesque and pathetic when he staggered on to a boat, or boarded with difficulty a train, bearing about his patient but unwilling person some dozens of hat boxes and topees.

Much to my disappointment we were transferred to the steam launch. I had artistic yearnings toward a sampan; but we were in a hurry, so the picturesque was sacrificed to the expeditious.

After breakfast—for it was still early—we walked to the theatre. I only know of two European theatres in China; but both are excellent—bar dressing-rooms. The theatre in Hong-Kong is in the Town Hall. It was not only nice, but it was clean.

We had in Hong-Kong a, for us, long holiday. Madame Patey and an admirable company of artists had possession of the theatre. We waited—unless I forget—a week or more, before we opened. The days I spent in prowling about Hong-Kong; and each night that Madame Patey sang, we had a feast of music.

Mr. Paulding had engaged a jinrickshaw and a coolie for me before we arrived. He had learned that wherever we were I would go—go all the time; and that the drain on the managerial exchequer was rather less if some vehicle of locomotion was bargained for, for me, before-hand. It was impossible to hire a carriage, because there were none. The Governor had a landau, if I remember, and some one else had some kind of a carriage, and there were a few dog-carts—a very few. Hong-Kong is so up and down—most of the streets are up so many flights of steps—that a trap would be comparatively useless. Indeed the ’rickshaws have often to go very much round about, where a chair “can go right up.” And there are many nooks of beauty to which the jinrickshaws cannot take you at all. We were great friends—were Chung Lim, my ’rickshaw coolie, and I, although he knew no English and utterly failed to understand my Chinese. He was a little creature, but oh! how he ran. When the amah and the hotel clerk between them had made him understand that I did not care where I went, but that I wished to go everywhere, and that I was vastly more interested in the Chinese than in the European quarter, he went sturdily to work to show me Hong-Kong, and show me Hong-Kong he did. For hours he used to run me up and down the long, narrow streets. From the upper windows of the tall, slim buildings hung the newly-washed garments of the natives. They were all cut after one generous ungraceful pattern, and were all of true Chinese blue, which is not true blue at all, it is so nearly a dull gray. Red paper streamers strung about the open doors told the shop-keepers’ names and the nature of their wares.

When I wished to stop the jinrickshaw I had to give a most undignified grunt, or tap Chung Lim sharply with my parasol. As I rarely carried a parasol I usually had to grunt. Grunting is one of the things a woman does not like to chronicle of herself; but it was the only sound to which my Hong-Kong coolie would pay the slightest attention. I tried screaming once or twice; but he evidently thought that I was singing, and he ran swiftly on. A grunt was something so akin to his own guttural mode of speech that he invariably recognised it as an attempt upon my part to communicate an idea or a desire.

I halted my “human horse” very often. Men passed me with great baskets of joss sticks; and though Chung Lim shook his head, I used at first to stop and buy from each vendor a few of the scented sticks; but I soon found that my coolie was right. They were a very bad quality of joss sticks indeed, those that I bought on the streets of Hong-Kong; but at the proper shops (and I soon found where they were), I bought great armfuls of the slim, fragrant incense sticks. And as I write, the long spark and the thin flame of a burning joss stick carries me back to China; and if I shut my eyes a moment, I can fancy myself back in a grotesque joss house to which Chung Lim and I very often went. It is called, if I remember, “Tin How.” I always took a bunch of joss sticks with me. I used to divide them with Chung Lim, who lit his share before his joss and said “Chin-chin” to me. I think that Chung regarded me as mad, but he never refused anything I offered him; and though I persistently prowled about the native quarters of Hong-Kong, my intrusion was never resented, though it evidently caused a good deal of amazement. Sometimes I stayed in the joss house and burned incense too, and tried to sketch the wonderful types of humanity that were gathered before the big joss. But oftener I roamed about outside, gathering flowers and trying to make friends with some workmen who were digging a few yards from the temple door. Often I sat in the ’rickshaw and studied the exterior of the joss house. I never grew tired of looking at it. Beneath the roof were depicted, in wonderful relief and bas-relief, scenes from Chinese history. They were dramatic in outline, and charming in glorious colouring.

The walls were hung with gorgeous panels, each of which was a prayer or a sermon. Upon the edge of the roof sprawled strange crustations. Beneath them was carved a fringe of conventionalised shells. Under this hung a narrow curtain of wood or stucco, on which, in bas-relief, were marvellous fruits, quaint flowers, odd figures, and impossible fish. This scant curtain was finished with an odd lace-like carving which told, as every bit of conventional decoration in China tells, the omnipotence of bamboo. Dreadful dragons and indescribable elephants supported the roof, and rested upon great graceful beams, from which hung huge lanterns made of silk, of paper, of tinsel, and of bamboo—the soft lamps of Cathay!

Near the doorway sat a personage—priest or merchant, I knew not which. He wore gold spectacles, he smoked opium through a silver pipe, and he committed upon you righteous, ecclesiastical robbery when he sold you joss sticks and prayers. I do not mean that he prayed for you; that he would, I fancy, under no circumstances do. But he sold you prayers printed upon slips of red Chinese paper. The Mongolian characters puzzled you a bit perhaps! That was insignificant—the Chinese gods could read them.

Upon the temple steps sat a stolid, motley crew. I used to buy vicious-looking yellow cakes from one fellow, and from a sour-appearanced old woman I never failed to buy my handkerchief full of the nuts of my childhood. She always rang my bit of money on the temple steps to see that I had not cheated her, and I always was a bit disappointed in her wares. Can you imagine a woman, who in her old age will not grow childish, because in her mature womanhood she has never ceased to be a child,—can you imagine her, half sitting, half reclining, in a Chinese ’rickshaw, and as the ’rickshaw is pulled through the pungent, hilly woods of Hong-Kong, saying in her wicked cosmopolitan heart, as she munches the peanuts of Cathay, “There are no peanuts but in America, and only an American darky or a naturalised Italian can roast them”?

Opposite the joss house sat a Chinese fortune-teller. His table stood in front of a big rock, about which graceful trees hung. Over the table was a cabalistic cloth, and the Mongolian wizard foretold your fate, using bamboo slips character-inscribed, and he was quite as infallible as any Occidental fortune-teller whom I ever patronised.

I often used to manufacture an excuse to go into and to linger in the courtyard of a Chinese carpenter who interested me greatly. He was one of the few accessible Chinamen I have ever known. It is very difficult to write positively of China, even after some residence there. The Chinese will tell you nothing, and, with a few exceptions, the Europeans who have spent half their lives there know nothing. But my friend, the carpenter, did give me a few peeps into China. He was almost always sawing, and his brother was almost always smoking a slender pipe that was nearly as long as himself. Two “sew sew” women often sat upon a low bench mending the tattered garments of the carpenter and his confrÈres.

“Sew sew amahs” are one of the institutions of China. A London paper has recently advocated, as an occupation for deftly needled but impecunious gentlewomen, the going from mansion to mansion and the mending of dilapidated garments. In China, that has been, for hundreds of years, an acknowledged profession for women. The “sew sew amahs” are really very useful. They sit outside your door or in a secluded corner of your garden, and stitch, stitch, stitch, for two sen a day, until you are whole again and clothed in your right garments. The Chinese women do not sew as well as do the Chinese men. It is only in the Orient and in Paris that man realises what a superior, noble occupation dressmaking is. But the women of the East mend very adequately; and I for one congratulate them that, among all their other miseries, they are not expected to devote their lives to the designing and first sewing of loom-woven fig leaves.

Has it ever occurred to the champions of the women of the East, that the Oriental man has not only crushed the Oriental woman beneath his cruel heel, but that he has robbed her of her most effeminate privilege, since he has usurped her sharp sceptre—her needle?

Happy Valley is a lovely spot, circled by gray-green hills and feathered bamboo. It is the race-course of Hong-Kong. Here ponies are run and frocks from home are worn, sandwiches are eaten and cool wines are drunk, and, take it all in all, it is quite like a toy Derby. It is a magnification of the “Ascot” that you may buy in the Lowther Arcade for a few pounds. No, it is not. No toy maker, though he were as tenderly sympathetic as sweet Caleb Plummer, much less a maker of toys in Germany, could manufacture such a toy as nature and Anglo-residents have made Happy Valley.

Separated from the race-course by a narrow bamboo-edged road is the Happy Valley Cemetery—an acre of beauty sacred to the eternal sleep of dead Europeans. I know of no other cemetery so beautiful in all our world. I know of no place commemorative of the dead that compares in loveliness with the Happy Valley Cemetery, save only the Taj Mahal. One is the triumph of nature; one is the supreme art triumph of man: but over both Death is triumphant, and the Indian Princess and the English wanderers are at rest—asleep and oblivious.

Only an even more presumptuous pen than mine would attempt to describe the Hong-Kong Public Gardens. They are matchless. Their flora is both mighty and lace-like; and from their detailed beauty you look away to the panoramaed beauty of Hong-Kong.

As I write on from page to page, the little story of our Eastern wanderings, I grow a bit frightened at my own temerity. I do so want to describe the wonderland through which we wandered, and I am so unable to describe it. China baffles me most. The country is so intricate with a thousand beauties, the people so unapproachable, their customs so puzzling, so almost inexplicable. But my excuse for trying to do what I am not fit to do, must be the old excuse, the great excuse, the excuse of love. I love the Orient; I prattle about it like a child perhaps; but if I could inspire one tired European to go East for a little to rest his eyes, his feet, and his heart, in the great, kind Oriental wonderland, then I should be, for once at least, a benefactor.

My boy and I spent many a happy half-day, being carried up and down the Hong-Kong hills—he in one chair, I in another. It was in Hong-Kong that he was promoted from dresses to trousers, and he used to sit in his high-swung chair, quite fearlessly, and chatter to his bearers. I was a little frightened at first lest they should drop him, but I soon learned how foot-sure they were and how careful of their light little burden. They never encouraged my advances towards good-fellowship; but they were ready enough to teach him the name of a flower or a bird, to run or to walk, as he wished. And often and often they spared one of their scanty coins to buy him a sweetmeat.

The heat in Hong-Kong was not excessive when we were first there, but it was warm enough to make the Peak a luxury. And it was a charming change to go to a friend’s bungalow not far from the Bowen Road and drink afternoon tea. And what dinners we used to have in some of those cool, white bungalows; and how we sang softly as we went home through the starlight.

But it was “China town” that I really loved. I have been in Hong-Kong where European women do not go—where, I believe, no other European woman has been. I have gone through dark arcades where hundreds of natives struggled with life and with each other. I have begged a mouthful of rice from a sampan woman. I have wandered alone until I was completely lost, and had to ask my way back to the world of hotels and Europeans. I never met with the slightest incivility. I found the Chinese everything that I had been told they were not.

At night, when I was not working, I used to get into my ’rickshaw and let Chung Lim pull me along the beautiful harbour until the beauty of the night had reconciled me to everything and every one, myself included.

I do not know where Chung Lim slept, nor where he ate. He was always at the hotel door when I went down, day or night; always smiling and ready to run with me to the island’s end. I paid him one yen per day. When we finally left Hong-Kong, I gave him five yen more than I owed him; and a sacrilegious English boy who lives in Hong-Kong, and to whose patronage I recommended Chung Lim, wrote me the other day, “Chung Lim still burns joss sticks to your memory.”

A GLIMPSE OF CANTON

What can I write of Canton? If Hong-Kong was wonderful, if Shanghai was interesting, if Burmah was picturesque, what was Canton? It was superlative!

I know that Europeans go into Canton and come out of it with stolid faces, and sneer languidly as they speak of it. I know a woman who preferred poor little, colourless, on-sufferance Sha-mien, to great, mysterious, unfathomable, lurid Canton. Ah, well! it takes all sorts to make a world—and I dare say I revolted her as much as she disgusted me. “Would you rather live in Canton than in Sha-mien?” some one asks me. Certainly not—at least not permanently. But I, nevertheless, regard Sha-mien as utterly insignificant as compared with Canton. The only significant thing about Sha-mien is its courage in being there at all. No; I should not prefer Canton to Sha-mien as a place of residence for myself. I should be sorry to spend twenty unbroken years in Canton, and I should be displeased to spend twenty unbroken years on the most magnificent iceberg that ever floated on the Polar Seas. But for all that I think the iceberg vastly more interesting, more fascinating, grander, more beautiful, than the snow-flakes that are feebly smudging my window-pane.

Let me introduce you for a moment to my London back-yard, as I see it at this moment. It is a grim conglomeration of rubble, dilapidated ivy, of thin snow blotches, and of burst water-pipes. Nothing could be less picturesque. No earthly eye could think it beautiful, save the eye of a plumber. Yet I would rather live here than in Canton, where a million pictures are yours for the looking. In all Canton I never saw one unpicturesque bit. And once I almost felt like tearing up my sketch-book—not because of my own incompetence, for to that I am accustomed, but because for every sketch I tried to make I must leave ten thousand unattempted. That made selection very difficult.

We sent Mr. Paulding from Hong-Kong to Canton, to see if we could give a performance at Sha-mien. He wrote back, “There are not a hundred Europeans in the place, and there is no theatre. It is expensive getting here. But if the ‘burra memsahib’ is determined to come, I think we might clear our X.’s. Leave the company in Hong-Kong, and you two give a Shakespearian recital in the hotel dining-room. What do you say?” Perhaps I should explain that “X.’s” means expenses. It is not theatrical slang, it is dramatic abbreviation. That letter entailed upon me a mental struggle. I was anxious to see Canton, and my husband insisted that if I went I must “help him out” with the recital. In all my wicked life I had never given a recitation—or at least not since I was a nice little girl with a nice pink sash. Moreover, I had said that I never would give a recitation. I did not approve of them; for that matter, I do not approve of them now; but Canton tempted me, and I was weak.

We made out a programme and mailed it to Mr. Paulding. Mine friend was prepared with any number of recitations, but the only one I knew was “Bingen on the Rhine,” and my associate feared that the audience might have heard that before. Finally, I was put down for two recitations, but it was not specified what they were to be. My husband selected his three recitations, and we added to the list four scenes from Shakespeare.

Early one morning, before our babies were awake, we steamed slowly up the Canton River. I put the thought of the horrid recital out of my mind; and settled into my cosy steamer chair and said to myself, “If there be an Elysium on earth it is this—it is this.” The day was perfect. Ah! how many perfect days this old world has seen, and yet how she throbs and smiles and blushes into beauty, and looks quite like a bride, the disreputable weather-beaten old jade, and welcomes the kisses of each new perfect day, and beneath those kisses assumes the virtue of loveliness, even though she have it not!

We were carrying some hundreds of coolies, and some thousands of fish to Canton. The coolies were tightly packed behind a secure grating. The fish were poured by hundreds into holes, purposely made in the side of the boat. How they sprang for their freedom, the scaly, silvery, speckled things, and with what splendid splutter and splash they fell back into the water-filled hole!

There were four cabin passengers on the delightful little bark. I was the only woman on the boat—fore or aft. When I am the only woman among a boat-load of men, and the weather behaves itself, I always say to myself, “If there be an Elysium on earth it is this—it is this!” The three gentlemen were—the Editor of a Hong-Kong paper, a charming fellow and a good friend of ours; an interesting German who spoke French fluently and told me a great deal about Canton; and last, but if you please, not least, that extremely fortunate individual who is my husband.

What a pleasant fellow the captain was! He will, most probably, never see these lines, and I feel it my duty to describe him. He was my fellow countryman—and the kind of man who causes you to hold up your head and say, “It’s a good thing to be an American.” I am supposed to be a bad American. I don’t quite plead guilty to the accusation; but I certainly do not fill Sir Walter Scott’s ideal of patriotism. I fear he would even consider my soul dead. My cosmopolitanism is far more than my patriotism. But it always gives me a deep thrill of real pleasure to meet in a foreign land—delightful Americans. I think of my compatriots as some one thought of a little girl whom they immortalised in the lines,

No one is more charming, more admirable, than a charming American. I know Americans whom the children of no other nation can excel. If patriotism consists in praising the shrilly cackling, over-diamonded women, and the ill-educated, shallow, opinionated men of our hoi polloi—why then I am not patriotic. They, beyond everything else human, set my teeth on edge, do Americans the vulgar. But because I cry out at them with genuine American acrimony, it does not follow that I am stupid enough to think them the only Americans. There is another type of American of whom I would far rather think, and I wish that he travelled more. I mean the man who stands hat in hand to welcome you on to the porch of his Virginia home. I mean the man who is superlatively a gentleman even when he carries our flag through the wigwams of the wild west. I mean—oh! well, I mean all that ilk!

Our captain was a courtly, cultivated gentleman. He was highly educated, and had lived in China intelligently. He was quite a perfect host.

Everything combined to make our little trip enjoyable. The Chinese butler not only understood his duty but did it. Dinner was eminently successful. But it was on deck that we were happiest.

China! China! For all your great antiquity, how new and fresh and fascinating you were to me!

Fortresses and pagodas dotted the banks, with here and there a scattered collection of squalid huts. The sky was royal, and the perfumed air swayed the branches of a dozen, to us unknown, trees.

Just before we reached Canton we passed the leper boats. The population of Canton is too dense for the most truly paternal Government on earth to risk the presence of lepers in the midst of the Cantonese myriads. The miserable lepers looked out at us from the windows of their boat-prisons. Had we been nearer they would have cried to us for food and cash. The sufferings of the Asiatic lepers are not exaggerated. I never went amongst them (and in India I went amongst them often) without thinking, “How long, O Lord! how long?”

Nothing impressed me as more unique in unique China than the perseverance of the Roman Catholic Church in her desperate attempt to convert the unconvertible Chinese.

The following telegram was recently sent from Shanghai:—“The Roman Catholic Mission at Lichuen, near the Szechuen border of the province of Hu-Peli, has been attacked by a mob. The priests escaped into the neighbouring provinces.”—Reuter. Similar messages have been flashed to us before; similar messages will be flashed to us again. So long as Europe overstrains the forbearance of Asia, the blood of a few Europeans must dampen the ire of the Asiatic populace.

I met in Canton a venerable churchman who has been for many years eminent in Roman Catholicism in China. Like all men eminent in the Church of Rome, he was a man of the world, open-minded, cultivated, and charmingly companionable. I ventured to ask him, “How many Chinamen have you converted during your long residence here—converted in the fullest, most absolute significance of the word?”

The old man looked across the Canton river, upon which we were at the time. To our left lay the floating prisons of the Cantonese lepers. To our right, floated the “flower boats” of the Cantonese frail. Then he answered me: “Daughter, none! But”—pointing with his thin white hand to the left—“we have alleviated suffering, and”—pointing to the right, “we have checked sin. There is yet great sin and great suffering calling out to us for help; and we are paving the way for the spiritual success of the priests unborn. Rome of the seven hills was not built in a day. Rome, the spiritual, will not be made perfect and entire in a generation. Little by little we are gaining ground here. A Chinaman pretends a conversion he does not experience—for the sake of benefits we confer on him. His children grow accustomed to our blessed symbols and our holy rites. It is our great hope that his grandchildren, or perhaps his great-grandchildren, may become truly and entirely sons of the true Church. In the meantime, we hope and pray and work, and do what good we may.” This then is the hope of Rome concerning China—to make possible the conversion of the Chinese of the future.

For this possible future accomplishment Rome spends vast sums of money—erects superb edifices—risks many noble lives. The Chinese accept the comforts bought with the money. They take shelter—when it suits their convenience—in the buildings that they demolish when it pleases their enraged whim; and they destroy the lives dedicated wisely, or unwisely, to their service.

Rome fails, and I believe will fail. The religion and the life of the Chinese are one. It is the same with all Eastern peoples except the Japanese. In the East, religion stands for social sanctities, for hygienic regulations. Above all, it is the national expression of patriotism. Moreover, the religions of the East suit the peoples of the East. The Christian religion does not. The Church of Rome, with her fine Machiavelian wisdom, does her utmost to make her belief appropriate to the Mongolian temperament and mentality. Rome fails—because she attempts the impossible. The religion of China (although in one sense little respected) is the poetry of China, the art of China, the tradition of China. It will make way, as the religion of the North American Indians has made way, when the Chinese are exterminated and ground in their native dust, as the North American Indians have been crushed and spiritually exterminated.

Can we blame the Chinese for their allegiance to a form of religion which has satisfied their extremest ethical need for thousands of years? I, for one, cannot unqualifiedly condemn them for their cruel inhospitality, when I recall scenes I have seen in the Chinese quarters of San Francisco and of Melbourne. I have seen a joss house demolished by the hands of civilised Anglo-Saxons; but I deplore that China’s not unnatural retaliation should fall upon a self-sacrificing body of men who only seek the good of China and the glory of the God in whom they earnestly believe.

Three years ago, almost to a day, I visited the Roman Catholic Mission which recently was destroyed by the infuriated Chinese. What a waste of art and life!

Every Englishman living in China, who is not blinded by an overplus of religious enthusiasm, will, I think, bear me out that the Chinese cannot be converted. An Anglican clergyman lived and preached for twenty odd years in Shanghai; he failed to make many converts. But he consoled himself inasmuch as he had snatched one brand from the burning. His “boy,” to whom he paid unusual wages, was a most devout Christian. When the divine left China he reluctantly parted with “Foo Sing,” bestowing upon him several Bibles and many yen. Half an hour after the English mail had sailed, a friend of the churchman’s met “Foo Sing.”

“Well, Foo Sing,” said the European, “what are you going to do now Dr. —— has gone?”

“Me,” said Foo Sing, “Me go chin chin my own joss. English joss all played out.”

Rome is attempting a great thing in China. Her methods are dignified; and the Chinese deal with Rome with proportional brutality. At the American Missionaries, the men of whom wear false “pigtails” and the women modified pantaloons, the Chinese merely laugh. One of the Chinaman’s chief characteristics is his sense of humour.

On the other side of our good ship (to return to our first entry into Canton), opposite to the poor leper boats, floated the famous flower boats of Canton. They were the prison palaces of the moral lepers of Canton. It was daylight now, and the small boats floated demurely on the rippled water. The matting blinds were down. The women were sleeping. When the sun had set, the little boats of sin would sparkle with a thousand lanterns and tinkle with a hundred guitars, and shameless mandarins would smoke long opium pipes and sip small cups of hot, perfumed wine.

The unfortunate women of China are at least less scourged by public opinion than are their Occidental sisters. Nor are they sneered at by their righteous half-sisters, nor slapped in the face by Mrs. Grundy’s wee white hands. They live apart.

We anchored some few yards from Canton, and then began what we thought rare fun. A world of sampans pushed about us, and the women coolies rushed on deck, demanding our luggage and begging to row us ashore. The women of the coolie class do all such work in Canton. We fell into the clutches of a good-natured old thing called “one-eyed Sarah.” She was very fat, very rich, and very jolly. Our friend the Editor chaffed her roundly, but she took it all in good part, and gave as good as she took. When we had accepted her as our boatman, she screamed to two young girls, who ran lightly up and shouldered our luggage quite calmly. My box was heavy, and we had quite a collection of little things. Sarah carried nothing, but she helped us all into her boat, and I learned afterwards that she would willingly have carried me because she thought I looked little and helpless. I am at least a head taller than Sarah.

How wonderfully those women guided their boat! They are wonderful watermen, the sampan women of Canton. We were jammed among some hundreds of other boats, and our position seemed inextricable and perilous. But it was neither the one nor the other. In and out they pulled, away from the steamer, up the narrow water-way that stretches between Canton and Sha-mien, until they landed us at the steps of the Sha-mien hotel. Then Sarah did lift me out on to terra firma, to the great delight of my disrespectful husband. “Little girl,” she said patronisingly, “but plenty heavy.”

Europeans are not allowed to live in Canton. Even to go into Canton they must have a pass or permit, which must be shown to the guards at the city gate. Sha-mien is the European concession. There live all the Occidentals who have diplomatic or other business at Canton. They are only a handful—the European permanent residents at Sha-mien; eighty odd, I think, they numbered when we were there—all told I mean; men, women and children. They live with their lives in their hands. The moral force of Europe is great, but if the Cantonese become vicious enough, they will rally across that narrow bridge and massacre every European in Sha-mien. They have done it before; they will do it again, if they grow angry enough. I hope that they never may. It is to be hoped that they will be given no cause.

The hotel was a pleasant, clean, white place. It stood upon green grass among green trees. A pretty little donkey came and begged a biscuit from me. It was the pet of Europe in Sha-mien. Our bills were profusely displayed in the hotel hall. They made me shudder a bit, for our recital was to be that night.

“Do you know yet what you are going to recite to-night?” asked my husband meanly.

“I think we’ll cut my recitations out,” I said sweetly.

“No we won’t,” said my husband. He even offered to accompany me up to our rooms and try to teach me some recitations; but I refused flatly. When the night came, I would get through it in some desperate fashion. But now I was going into Canton.

Canton lay just across the canal. It was walled, as almost every Chinese city is. We could catch no glimpse of the city itself from Sha-mien. That made me the more impatient to be off.

There are at least three wonders in the East that can never be exaggerated: the Taj Mahal, sunrise on the Himalayas, and Canton.

I forget our guide’s name—we could not go into Canton without a guide; but he appeared very much of a gentleman and spoke accurate English. We went into quaint box-like palanquins. There were four chairs, two for us, one for our Editor, and one for the guide. Three coolies carried each chair. Across the bridge; through the guarded gateway: We were in Canton!

If I could describe it as perfectly as I remember it! I had expected noise and crowds, new sights, new sounds, new smells, long endless streets, and tall, tall houses. But what I found was ten times more. The streets were often so narrow that, if two chairs wished to pass, one had to retreat into the nearest shop until the other had gone on. The houses were so tall that they seemed to lean toward each other and to touch at the vertical point of sight. Indeed many of them did almost meet—they were so built out with balconies. I don’t know what was in the upper rooms of those houses; but certainly everything appeared to be on the balconies. What clothing a poor or middle-class Chinaman possesses beyond that on his back usually hangs on his balcony. The Chinese have more cleanliness than they are accredited with by the generality of Europeans.

We went for miles in Canton without seeing the sky. The density of the city, the swarming, seething inhabitants, the variety of shops and trades, are indescribable.

The first shop at which we stopped was the studio of painters on rice paper. And a very unstudio-like place it was. The artists (two of them were famous) sat at workman-like tables, doing their careful work. The rice paper is lovely of itself, and the painting was exquisitely done. Chinese art is a difficult subject. The Chinese execution is often very delicate; the Chinese sense of colour is very true, though with the exception of their dull predominant blue, all their colours are brilliant in the extreme. But even their characteristic blue they use rather sparingly in their painting. Chinese drawing impressed me as primitive, but not inexact; but if I were less ignorant about Chinese art, I might regard it very differently.

I have a dozen or more of the dainty “rice pictures” that were being painted in that queer unartistic Cantonese studio. Not one picture has been painted by one man. For instance, I have among them the figure of a mandarin. It is not over six inches high, but it represents the considerable work of three artists, one of them noted throughout China. He painted the mandarin’s face, and told me that for thirty odd years he had painted faces, and done no other thing, save to sleep a little, eat a great deal, worship his ancestors, and chin chin his joss sometimes. He was a courtly old gentleman, and smilingly allowed me to spoil several sheets of rice paper, and waste sundry brushfuls of colour, trying to imitate his methods. The draperies of my little figure were painted by another artist, and the hands were the work of a third man who paints nothing but hands. There were men there who painted nothing but leaves—others who painted only flowers. There were other men who spent all their lives painting one picture again and again. The picture they painted one week, they copied the next. And one artist in that room painted only caterpillars—he had painted nothing else for ten years. He painted them exquisitely. It will be readily understood that their execution was deft and exact in the extreme, but that their work lacked breadth, great atmosphere, and inspiration of design.

Next we stopped at a jeweller’s. They were making queer silver things, and inlaying them with infinitesimal bits of bright blue feather. The finished ornaments were more curious than beautiful; but the wings that lay upon the workmen’s trays were magnificently beautiful. Thousands of kingfishers are murdered every year to deck these foolish Chinese baubles. I believe that the meat of the birds is utilised for food; and that, of course, makes the crime nil—if we are to eat slaughtered innocents at all.

We bought ivories at one shop, and carved ebonies at another. We saw baskets full to the brim with rare pearls; we saw seed-pearls sold by the pound.

Our journalistic friend had come to Canton on business; but he was neglecting it that he might help us to see more thoroughly the city, which he probably knew as well as any Englishman in China.

We pressed in between the busy looms in a big weaving establishment. The men talked learnedly of looms and like machinery all over the world; and I gloated over the marvellous silks and satins. We went through such gorgeous collections of black furniture. My husband, who rarely longs for any creature comfort beyond a cigar, a rowing boat, and a horse, was as tempted as I—I, who am always and so easily tempted,—and wanted to buy a boat-load of the great, grotesque, carved things.

On our way back to the city gate, we stopped at a silk shop, and my husband bought me a shawl that I kissed for its sheer loveliness, and crÊpes that I patted and stroked, and, when we were home, threw in great, soft, silken heaps on the bed.

Chinese and Japanese embroideries are very different. Each excels in some qualities. The Japanese are the more admirable in the use of gold and silver; the Chinese are the superior in the use of many and mingled colours.

When we reached the hotel—none too soon,—my spirits fell. We had a hurried but merry dinner, and then we went upstairs, with just an hour and a half to spare before our great “Shakesperian Recital.”

“James,” said my husband, severely,—he calls me James when I’m bad—“James, you’re a villain.”

“But you are a saint,” I said in my most wheedling accents. “And you know you recite superbly. You do all the recital. Tell them I’m dead—make a speech before you begin, you know. And I will sit at the door, and take tickets, and lead the applause.”

But he was uncoaxable. So I had to dress, and descend into the little ante-room off the dining-room. I took with me a book of “Fine Poetical Selections,” and searched feverishly for something to read. I boast of having an exceptionally quick “study,” but, of course, I could not memorise three poems in one hour and five minutes; so I had necessarily determined to read, and not to recite.

I was the unhappiest woman in China that night.

My husband was in a gale of delight. He had trapped me into a recital for once.

Well, it began at last. All the Europeans in Sha-mien—save one, I believe—were there.

Our little stage was very wonderful. While we had been palanquin riding through Canton, three or four coolies had brought into the dining-room pieces of bamboo of different lengths. These had not been nailed together; they had tied them together with wisps of bamboo until the stage was shaped. Then across the top they had laid smooth planks. Into these even they had not driven a nail, they had tied them in place. The result was a perfect little stage.

My confrÈre opened the, to me, ghastly entertainment. When he came off, I seized my book desperately, and marched to my doom. They gave me a cordial little reception. I could have shaken them. Our friend the Editor, who knew the full measure of my unpreparedness, sat in the front row, trying manfully to look respectful. Mr. Paulding stood gracefully near the door. He looked anxious and nervous, and appeared contemplative of flight.

I thought of Demosthenes, and wondered how it would do to begin by saying, “Men and women of Sha-mien.” But really they looked too gentle; so I said instead, “Ladies and gentlemen.” My husband giggled in the ante-room. I could hear him. I opened the book—opened it by chance at “Ostler Joe.” It wasn’t quite long enough, so I prefaced it with a speech. In that speech I told all I knew, and a good deal that I didn’t know, about the history of the piece, the author of the piece—an American woman who had made it famous in Washington; and I remember that I contrived to say something about the Princess of Wales. At that they broke into hearty applause. Then I began to read. The print was bad, and the light was worse, but I struggled through in some sad fashion. When I had finished, it was the most astonished little audience you ever saw; and Mr. Paulding had left.

I won’t chronicle my other two selections, nor record how they were received. But, I assure you, on my word of honour as an actress, that I was not a success.

However, I am, I believe, justified in saying that the second part of the programme was worse than the first. The second part comprised four scenes from Shakespeare—so the programme said. Mr. Paulding says that I wrote the programme; I say that he wrote it. My husband, who, with all his faults, is a gentle, peace-making man, says that the mistakes in the programme were made by the Chinese printer. Mr. Paulding and I are both reluctant to parent the programme when we recall how it was carried out. The details of the “Four Scenes from Shakespeare” were⁠—

A Scene from Romeo and Juliet.

A Scene from Macbeth.

A Scene from Antony and Cleopatra.

A Scene from The Fool’s Revenge.

At least so the Chinese printer said, but who could expect a Cantonese compositor ever to have heard of Tom Taylor?

I do not know which of the four tragic selections was the funniest.

Picture Romeo, Macbeth, Antony, and Bertuccio in a nice new dress suit, nice new patent-leather shoes, nice new white kid gloves; picture Juliet, Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra, and sweet, simple little Fiordelisa in a long, black, jetted, sleeveless French frock, ridiculously long tan gloves, and shoes that were monstrous Parisian burlesques of the “human foot divine!”

Need I say that there was no scenery? I tried to do my duty as a soldier of the mask should. But my husband, who is a very shameless person, was in an unseemly state of hilarity. And indeed, for all my trying, I cannot say that Juliet’s impassioned words fell “trippingly from my tongue.”

It was over at last, and the kind, patient audience went sadly out. Across the globe I send them my greeting. Perhaps they will forgive me the dire distress I must have inflicted upon them if they ever learn that their misspent yen enabled me to see Canton.

How good, how English they were, those patient people! They would have taught me, had I not known long before, that, whatever an English audience may think, it is incapable of showing disapprobation to a woman.

When the poor audience had escaped we had supper; our editor, Mr. Paulding, my husband, and I. The editor said that he preferred my acting to my reciting. Mr. Paulding said he had enjoyed the entertainment immensely—especially after he left. My husband laughed and laughed, and I ate my supper and suggested a midnight prowl through Canton.

But that, like much I say, was easier said than done. The Canton gate was shut. So we said good-night and retired as nice English people should. I lit a big flare of joss sticks in our chamber, for I had no mind to forget, even in my sleep, that I was in Cathay.

We sat for a few moments on our balcony and spun strange webs of fancied thought about Canton. We struck, with our mental fingers, a thousand copper gongs and weaved big fabrics of Mongolian romance. And all the while Canton was asleep.

The Chinese are a very normal people. Though their industriousness prods them to lamp-lit work, they, as a rule, sleep as soon after sunset as they can.

The next day broke in big Oriental splendour. There was to be no Shakespearian Recital that night. We were going to spend the week in Canton, and I was the happiest woman in Asia.

When we had paid to the Chinese dawn the weak obeisance of buttered toast, fried fish, and superlatively hot coffee, we sallied forth into Canton. How shall I describe that week? I can’t describe it. I can only say, “Go East—go East—go East!”

We found the same chairs awaiting us. Our guide looked brisk and ready; he had not attended our Shakespearian Recital. They carried us first to the Cantonese execution-grounds. We did not go into them. I am a curious, inquisitive, not to say a tautological female, but I did not care to penetrate into that place of slaughter.

Three or four of our boys went from Hong-Kong to Kowloon to see an execution. That was what they said; but revelations over which they had no control led me to believe that they, in part at least, went to pit the hard-earned wages of histrionic genius against the oblong gold pieces of Chinese exchange.

They, knowing what a free-lance I was, asked me to go with them to observe the extinguishment of sinful Chinese life; but my imagination is more than my courage, and I declined. My husband was (what husband would not have been?) madly angry.

I have never known whether the boys were joking or not; but I am inclined to give them and myself the benefit of the doubt and to believe that they were.

At all events, our Cantonese guide was in grim earnest, and evidently felt injured because he was prevented from showing us what he apparently thought the chief glory of his native city.

If you too, good reader, feel deprived of your sanguinary rights, I must refer you to the printed records of more strongly-minded travellers. There have been many such, and in their pages you will find your just due of gory Chinese swords and of ghastly, trunkless Chinese heads in big brown jars.

We spent several hours in a fascinating shop where old Chinese robes and marvellous antique embroideries were sold. My husband bought me a charming, magnificent cape that had belonged very many years before to a mandarin. It was coarsely designed, but superfinely executed open-work. Roses, leaves, and butterflies were the burden of its embroidered song. The points of its irregular edges were finished with queer, silky, crimson knobs and wee golden bells. Last summer I took off the balls and the bells and three of the most prononcÉ butterflies, and the former cape of the noble yellow man made an inexpressibly effective zouave on my prettiest house gown.

We were a little disappointed in the temple of the five thousand genii and in the five-storied pagoda. But the flowery pagoda was a marvel of quaint beauty; and the changing, panoramic wonder of the streets never palled upon us.

We had a Chinese lunch with a Chinese dignitary, and he let me prowl about his mansion and the ridiculous courtyard. He introduced me to his wife, and she introduced me to her husband’s concubines, with whom she seemed to be on the best of terms.

In China “concubine” means something very analogous to the “handmaiden” of Biblical times. She is not a wife, but to Occidental ears the term is best understood if it is translated “underwife—lesser wife.”

After lunch we visited the sanctum of a Cantonese editor, and from there we went to one of the large popular markets. Shall I describe it? Shall I try? Yes; there were—black ones and white ones and gray ones. The black ones are considered far the most choice. Isn’t it horrible to think of human creatures eating cats and dogs and rats? Is it not most horrible? And yet—why? Can we allege one single sound reason against it? I think not. And yet as I stood in that Cantonese market I did feel for a moment very much as Hamlet felt when he held Yorick’s earthy skull in his hands. As for my husband; he fled. I wonder why men are in so many ways daintier than women?

It was a gruesome sight, that busy market-place, with great piles of meat cut from animals we scarcely mention when we eat. Poor pussies! they looked very pathetic. And I could have cried over the massacre of the puppies. The rats hung in countless numbers upon long, stretched strings. Probably I would better not describe more minutely. It did revolt me. And yet I do not know why it should have done so.

Unless we adopt vegetarianism and abstain from eating aught that has possessed animal life and consciousness, I do not see how we can consistently condemn the Chinaman, because he is less erratic than we in his selection of food, and because he is the creature of a sterner necessity than ours. If we consider the vast numbers of Chinese that must eat to live,—if we consider the proportional density of the population,—I am sure that we shall be just enough to realise that the Chinese must utilise every available atom of wholesome food.

Emperors and heroes have supped off strange flesh in time of war. According to some historians Napoleon’s larder was reduced to cat’s flesh, during the retreat from Moscow.

The most elegant woman I ever knew, a French woman who went through the Commune, told me once, “Ze meat of ze horse, it iz very nasty, but ze meat of ze rat it is nice, if you know not what it iz.”

“The hand of little employment hath the daintier sense.”

We tip-tilt our nice European noses at a great deal, because we have had no usage of it. Sometimes we are condemned as unreasonable. Prejudice and lack of sympathy are near akin to injustice and misjudgment.

We left Canton reluctantly. As we neared Hong-Kong my comrade said to me—

“James, would anything on earth induce you to repeat that recital?”

“My friend,” I said, “if I could have another long day’s prowl about Canton I would stand up and recite the whole play of Hamlet all by myself,—and to an audience of three.” And I meant it.

CHINESE PRISONERS

The Chinese people are law-abiding. With those of their own number who are law-breakers they have but little sympathy, and the Government has none at all. I like China. I like the Chinese. Moreover, I respect them. But in two details of their national life they merit unqualified condemnation. Their hospitals and their prisons are unmitigated national disgraces. On second thought I withdraw the word unmitigated. The Chinese hospitals through which I went were almost everything that hospitals should not be. But the patients themselves would most strenuously have opposed, most feverishly have resented, any improvements along the line of their own comfort. The savants of China are held back by the taut ropes of public opinion, they are enchained by the general ignorance, as savants are everywhere else.

The deplorable condition of the Chinese prisons is justified in the national philosophy. To the Chinese mind a law is a thing to be obeyed. A law concerns millions, and conserves the welfare of millions. It must be held inviolate by the individual, be his whim, his personal bent, whatever it may. The Chinaman who disregards any item of the Chinese law becomes a social leper. Individual tendency, moral ill-health, inherited traits, they are not taken into account at all. This is cruel? Yes! But it renders existence possible in the over-density of Chinese population.

A Chinaman is forgiven nothing because of his ancestry; nor does he suffer for that ancestry. From the moment of his birth, each Chinaman has, theoretically and, as far as possible, practically, an equal chance with every other Chinaman. Rank is nowhere more venerated than in China. Nowhere does it secure to its possessor more benefits, more privileges; but it is not inherited. It is conferred by the Emperor—conferred for personal merit or for personal achievement. No Chinaman is “noble” except through personal fitness. There are but two exceptions to this rule—two only. The direct descendants of Confucius have a rank of their own. It is a high rank. It is respected; but it gives them no power of interference with national affairs. The descendants of an Emperor are never less than royal; but they have not necessarily any power. In brief, then, in China “every man is served according to his deserts,” and it is greatly to the national credit that they who do not “’scape whipping” are so very few.

A Chinese prison is called a “kamlo.” Its outer door is barred with bamboo and is guarded by petty soldiers or policemen. The kamlo contains two rooms and two yards. One room and one yard are for men; the other room and yard are for women. The space set apart for women is very much smaller than that for men; but the women’s quarters and the men’s quarters are alike in being entirely devoid of any provision for personal comfort or for personal decency.

Chinese prisoners are, by the Government, provided with absolutely nothing but the space, beyond which they may not pass. If their friends thrust food to them through the bars of the prison fence the law does not interpose; otherwise the prisoners may starve; the law does not interpose.

I have seen a woman feeding her husband while her six children looked on and laughed. I have seen a boy of nine pushing his hand through the slats of the fence and dropping rice into the open mouths of his father and mother!

I used to take food to the Shanghai prison-yards: I was not jeered at. A Chinese crowd is, I believe, incapable of jeering at a woman. But I was condemned for it, and a high Chinese official remonstrated with my husband. I used to buy Chinese food at a cheap chow-chow shop, and, when I reached a prison fence, hire a coolie to feed the poor starving wretches. I did not quite care to feed them myself, and it was quite impossible for them to feed themselves. No Chinese prisoner, of the class of which I am writing—minor offenders—can reach his own mouth, for his neck is invariably locked into a board which is about three feet square. This board is called a “cangue.” It is very heavy and galls the neck; it blisters or ossifies the shoulders. The “pig-tail” drags heavily over it, and pulls the poor enlocked head uncomfortably to one side. It prevents the hands from lifting rice or water to the craving mouth, and from brushing from the tingling nose one of the myriad insects that infest the prisons and prison-yards of China.

I bought a long wooden spoon, to the huge amusement of the Shanghai gamin, and I never found any difficulty in hiring a coolie to dispense my petty charity, until one day, when I took rice to the women’s fence. I had been there often before, but on this day I saw a strange sight. Three women were locked into one long cangue, and the two other women in the kamlo-yard vied with the crowd in hurling abusive epithets at their united heads. They had bad faces, but they looked very hungry and exhausted. I could induce no one to feed them. My amah, who was with me, caught me by the hand and cried, “Clome holme, clome to you mallie man.” I saw that there was something very much amiss; even my ’rickshaw coolies looked ashamed of me, and so I did go home to my “mallie man,” as the amah called my husband. We learned that the three women were procuresses. China does not, I believe, decapitate her female criminals; but the women who assist the downfall of young Chinese womanhood are looked upon as criminals apart, and as, than all other criminals, more vile, and are given the excessive punishment of being locked together by their necks.

Divorce is as facile to a Chinaman as marriage. The concubine of a mandarin takes precedence of a coolie’s wife; but the woman who is general in her immorality, is despised and shunned. As for the older women who trade in the frailty of their own sex, no one in China has the least mercy for them, except, of course, the missionaries.

The position of woman is not, in China, altogether inferior to that of man. It is true of the Chinese, as of every other polygamous people I have known (except perhaps the wretched Mormons), that with them womanhood is in some ways guarded, protected, and reverenced as it is not with us who live in the enlightened West.

A great deal of ignorant nonsense is written about China. Can a people who are so merciless toward crime be largely immoral?

In their treatment of China itself the Chinese have been exemplary. And what proves more the virtue of a nation than the use they make of their own country?

To conserve the physical health and productiveness of China, the Chinese have exercised the most rigid self-sacrifice.

For thousands of years the Chinese have developed the many resources of their wonderful country. They have had the great wisdom of patience. The southern part of the Malay Peninsula and the island of Singapore have been nearly devastated by the mad over-production of nutmeg trees. Thousands and tens of thousands of acres of North America are barren or nearly barren to-day; because the men who owned them, a few years ago, forced from them larger and more frequent crops than Nature had capacitated them to give. The Chinese have made no such mistakes. They have asked no more from their “happy valley of the Seres” than the surplus of her productiveness. Consequently, China is as full to-day of mineral, of vegetable, of animal life as when it was virgin to the husbandry of the first ancestors of the strange yellow people who now live in and cherish China. Sleek, dappled, big-eyed deer roam as fearlessly among the pungent forests, and are as plentiful as when the old Latin writers described the men of Cathay as “great bowmen.” Great silky hares scurry among the ferns. Golden pheasants nest among the wild white roses. Snipe and quail thieve fatness from the rice fields. Teal and pigeons cool their feet in the wet, paddy beds, and wee rice-birds plume themselves and swing and sway on the swinging, swaying branches of the purple-flowered wistaria.

Ah, yes, China has grown more beautiful with every passing year, as a woman grows more beautiful whose home-life is loved and loving! Her children grow up; her soft hair whitens; but the loveliness of content and happiness beautifies her features, and she can defy old age, for love and kindness have kept her young. A happy marriage has made many a plain woman pretty. China has been very happy in the race that has drawn its sustenance from her. Her civilisation is one of the oldest extant. Her architecture is antique. But she, in her own person, is verdant, fresh, and smiling. She has been loved and cared for tenderly.

THE CHINESE NEW YEAR

If one had a great many debtors and no creditors one might well wish on New Year’s Day to be among the Chinese a Chinaman.

Every Chinaman, unless he is a very Mongolian blackleg indeed, pays his debts on New Year’s Day, or on the last day of the old year, that he may start afresh with fresh books. Think what a splendid arrangement if huge sums of money were owing to one! Picture the cruel inconvenience if one were deeply in debt!

I remember one long-ago morning in old Los Angelos. I was a child. Very early I woke with a cry of terror. There certainly was a terrifying din in the town. Out of my window I saw a strange, threatening smoke, and through the window came dire, gunpowdery smells. I remember that I ran, crying, to my father, and sobbed out that the Indians or the Mexicans were coming. But I was assured that it was merely the Chinese celebrating their New Year, and that I might eat my breakfast of fresh figs and cream in the greatest security.

We had a “washee man” in Los Angelos, a long, lank Chinaman with abnormally black eyes. He was a great favourite of mine, and I taught him the alphabet (which I didn’t very well know myself) and the Lord’s Prayer. He always treated me with great ceremony and respect, and my baby mind was puffed out delightfully. I felt that I was quite a missionary light—a friend and an enlightener of the heathen. And I never could understand why my father laughed at me, and seemed unenthusiastic about John.

In America every Chinaman is “John,” or at least it was so in those days; and we were ignorant of the man’s characteristic Mongolian appellations.

He was always in our debt a few dollars. I don’t know how he managed it, but he did manage it most deftly. For one thing he never had any change, and he never came for payment when my father was at home; and as of course, my mother never had any change either, John usually carried some small amount over to “all same next time.”

“There are no roses like the roses of Southern California, and no noise like a Chinese noise,” said my father as we sat on the verandah at breakfast.

As he spoke John came slowly up the garden path. He was dressed more like a mandarin than a washerman, but his face was very sad.

“How do. Halpie New Yeal,” he said rather reluctantly. Then he laid, most reluctantly, two dollars and forty cents beside my mother’s plate.

“What is it, John?” she said.

“Chlange me owey you.”

“You can take it off next month’s bill.”

John’s bright eyes brightened, but he shook his head sadly.

“Must pay. China New Yeal. Chinaman must pay all tin. Me pay plenty yen. All me owey me pay. Too me pay Joss pidgen.” Then he seemed to shake off his sorrow at having yielded up the coin. He presented me with a box of fire-crackers and went away, with the peaceful air of a Chinaman who had done his duty.

Wherever Chinamen are, the Chinese New Year is observed in the same way. I have seen it in Los Angelos, in San Francisco, and in New York. In Melbourne, on the Australian diggings, in Calcutta, in Burmah, in the Straits Settlements, and in China it is the same. Millions of crackers fizz and explode; that is the most noticeable feature of the day. Friends and acquaintances call on each other. Strangers choose the day to pay visits of respect to Chinese notables. Debts are paid. Feasts are eaten and shops are closed.

No civilised nation keeps so few holidays as does the Chinese. New Year’s Day is the one day of national rest. It is the only day of the year on which all the shops are shut.

The Chinese New Year is not co-occurrent with ours. The festivities begin on New Year’s Eve, which falls on the 30th day of the 12th moon of the old year. All China—men, women, and children—sit up to greet the dawn of the New Year. And they do greet it with the discharge of millions and billions of crackers. I know a man in Hong-Kong who is slightly deaf. He declares that his hearing was seriously injured in Canton on one New Year’s Day. I myself have been in a Chinese city when the smoke from the New Year’s crackers was almost as dense and as disagreeable as the London fog in which I am writing.

From midnight on New Year’s Eve every Chinese house is swept and garnished for the reception of visitors. Joss sticks are lit before the family gods. The black-carved furniture is polished. Newly-cut sugar canes are placed beside the threshold, and an incredible quantity of tea is infused. The master of the house remains at home to do the Celestial honours to whoever may call. The women of the family and all the younger men leave home at an early hour, that they may get through a long list of calls.

Each caller leaves a card. It is a long slip of red Chinese paper. On it are printed the visitors’ names, titles, and addresses. Friends exchange presents of tea, sweetmeats, ornaments, and fruits. They exchange long complimentary letters, the writing of which is in China a fine art. Every guest is regaled with tea and refreshments, which range from absurd-looking sweetmeats to tinsel-decked roast pigs.

On New Year’s Day the Chinese wear their dresses of ceremony and their festival dresses. It is every Chinaman’s ambition to be a mandarin. On New Year’s Day every Chinaman apes the dress of a mandarin as closely as the law will allow. On New Year’s Day in Japan—unless we happen, as we sometimes do, to be in their bad graces—every Japanese man rushes into a frock coat and under a silk hat. But the Chinese are grandly insular always, and they borrow nothing from us in their celebration of their great national holiday. Ah Man’s beau ideal of holiday attire is a conical hat, a long silk cloak, gigantic shoes, and grotesque stockings.

Whatever the Chinese do they do thoroughly. Thoroughness is their chief characteristic. They are the most industrious people in the world and the most tireless. They rarely take a holiday, but when they do, they take it vigorously. There are no half-way measures about their merry-making. If they work, they work with a method and a muscle, a persistence and an exactness, that shames European industry. If they keep accounts, they compute the fraction of a fraction far beyond where we lose sight of it. If they drink tea, they drink it as tea elsewhere never yet was drunk. And if they have a good time, they have it in all its details. Every lantern is lit that can shed one more ray of merry light upon the festivity; every shrill instrument is played that can augment the noise and hubbub. There is only one thing that a Chinaman loves more than hubbub, and that is noise.

After noise and hubbub he adores gambling. At the New Year season he gambles excessively. Gambling is a most deplorable habit; but the Chinese gamble so well, in China gambling is such a fine art, that I must own I loved to watch them play, and could never feel, at their great national weakness, half the horror that I knew I ought to have felt. But gambling certainly is the cause of great misery in China. And the New Year tide is the gamester’s carnival. Ah well, the Chinese have so few faults that I think they can afford to plead guilty to this one—grave though it is. It is a fault born of quick brains, of strong nerves, of active fingers, and of daring natures.

Are you scowling at me because I say the Chinese have few faults? I repeat it. If you go among them as I have gone, if you will win your way with them, if you will come to know them as I have known them, you will, I think, agree with me. The Chinese are not altogether prepossessing to European eyes; but they are, I believe, worthy of all European respect and of great European confidence. You have known some very bad Chinamen, perhaps? So have I. That proves nothing. Why, I have known some bad Englishmen,—I have even known one bad American. Travelling Europeans make no greater mistake than in forming their judgment of a great and peculiar people from the few members they have slightly known of that big, national body. I was recently present when an able and eloquent man said to one of England’s greatest physicians: “I have proof of ten fever cases where the temperature has been reduced by the power of ——,” the remedy he was advocating. “Bring me ten thousand such instances, well authenticated, and I shall think that it deserves scientific investigation,” said the doctor. I thought that the acme of wise, prudent reasoning; and I wish that that eminent physician might make and record a tour of Asia. Whatever he did, he would do well—his calm exactness would make him eminent in anything. Agassiz never laid down as a truth of the swallow family what he had observed on the breast of one swallow! We make ourselves ridiculous if we judge the countless Chinese nation by a handful of inferior Chinamen whom we have known imperfectly. We might as justly say that Florence Nightingale was immoral because there are unfortunate women in London. Shall we call Tennyson illiterate because our dustman is h-less and h-ey? Shall we believe the Lord Chief Justice a murderer because Whitechapel once had a Jack-the-Ripper?

The Chinese New Year crackers must afford occupation to a vast number of poor people. The varieties of the crackers are legion, and the number fired every New Year’s Day is not to be computed by a small mind or a limited arithmetician. We were walking once in interior China. It was early in the Chinese year. We noticed at some distance a strange scarlet hillock. We went curiously toward it. Not until we were very near did we discover that it was the remnants of many thousands of crackers. The burning crackers had been thrown upon a bed of wild white roses; they had scorched the leaves and seared the stems; but that had been some weeks before. The dÉbris of the crackers was decaying; it manured the rose roots, and the roses were pushing up among the torn scarlet-cracker bits. A thousand fragrant, waxen flowers were backgrounded against the red shreds of the fireworks.

The beauty of China and the excellence of the Chinese are vividly backgrounded by all that is grotesque or faulty in the people of China. Strangely, we seem to be blind to the flower, while we see the background only too clearly.

I have heard that the Chinese roses are scentless. That proves how much I must be the slave of my potent imagination. I thought that I had known no sweeter flower than the wild white rose of China.

There is no country that we misunderstand more grossly than we misunderstand China; but there is no country that can more afford to be indifferent to misconception.

ORIENTAL OBSEQUIES

Chinese Coffins

If I may say so, without appearing over-anxious to advertise my Irish ancestry, the most important event in a Chinaman’s life is his funeral.

A Chinese crowd is the culmination of human noise; and the Chinese are never so noisy as at a funeral. They have hearty appetites at all times, but they never eat so much as they do at a funeral feast. When I first lived in China I used to find it almost impossible to distinguish between a funeral procession and a marriage procession. In the centre of one the coffined corpse is borne on the shoulders of men. In the centre of the other similar men bear upon their shoulders the bride, who is in an enclosed sedan chair, and she is followed by her bridesmaids. But, to the casual observer, the two ends of the two processions are quite alike in every other respect. Tom-toms, red-clothed coolies carrying roasted pigs and other dainties, smaller coolies carrying cheap paper ornaments of a Mongolian theatrical type,—these are the invariable elements of both processions.

China, if you know it at all, is the easiest of the Oriental countries to write about; although it is very difficult to inform yourself about the Chinese, they are so bitterly exclusive. For any scrap of information you once obtain is necessarily exact. The versatile Japanese have a hundred modes of life; the conservative Chinese have one. The Indian peninsula is inhabited by a hundred distinct peoples; peoples of varying origins, speaking different languages, obeying differing laws, wearing dissimilar dress. These Indian tribes intermingle more or less; their country is so over-populated that they must. But they learn almost nothing from each other; they adopt nothing from each other. They so rarely intermarry that for the purposes of general writing I may say they never do it. The narrow prejudice or the magnificent conservatism (whichever it is) that has kept the petty Indian tribes distinctly separated from one another has kept the great unnumbered and almost numberless Chinese nation, a nation apart from all the rest of the human world. But, unlike the rigidly conservative Indians, the Chinese have taken a great many ideas from aliens. We must not think, because as a people they will not mingle with us nor admit us into their national heart, nor into their homes, nor into the bowels of their country, that they never learn anything from us. They have learned a great deal, they are learning, and they will learn. But what they adopt from us they so assimilate with their vividly characteristic national modes of thought and life, that that superficial mammal, the travelling European, never suspects that many of the conveniences of everyday Chinese life are adaptations of Aryan customs or of European tools.

The Chinese are to-day the most unique, the most ancient, and the most misunderstood people on the earth. I say the most ancient because they are the least changed from what they were long centuries ago. The least changed—they are not changed at all! The China of to-day is the China Marco Polo knew. In the thirteenth century commercial intercourse was frequent between China and Europe. A long caravan route extended from the southern provinces of China to Genoa. The men who took a year to go from their Chinese homes to the great Italian mart, taking with them their precious merchandise of silk and ivory, of tissue and of pearls, differed in almost no way from the men that of recent years have flocked to the Australian diggings and the Californian goldfields.

Europe has pierced its aggressive way into China. China, belching with its congested population, has overflowed into Europe. On the whole, we have, I think, been treated better in China than the Chinese have been treated here. We have often been very rude to Ah Foong. Nevertheless he has gained his point: he has earned enough money to return to the Celestial Empire, to live there in affluence, and to be buried there with Éclat. And when he has left Europe he has taken with him something more than English gold. A few of us have been in China. (I am not speaking of the missionaries—I regard them as a people apart.) What have we gained in China? A strange experience (to me a pleasant one), a pound of perfumed tea and a bale of flowered crÊpe, for both of which we have paid right handsomely. We have been treated in the main politely; but, sooner or later, most of us are bowed out of China, if not by the Emperor, why, then, by the climate.

The Chinese have, at least, three religions—Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism; but the funeral rites of the three sects are almost, if not quite, identical. There are several reasons for this. The three religions are much alike, and are all largely founded upon Indian Buddhism. Moreover, religion is a very second-class affair indeed in China. The priests are not at all an honoured class; they are usually treated with open contumely. There are no religious dissensions in China, it is not a matter of enough importance. The priests of two sects often live together in the chummiest way. Filial devotion is the real religion of China. All China is one huge family, and the Emperor is the “Great Father.” By the way, “Great Father” is what the North American Indians call God; and the Chinese consider their Emperor a god. How we human atoms ring our petty changes on a few poor thoughts! There is one more reason why all Chinese funerals are greatly alike. China is a land of ceremonials, and the smallest details of those ceremonials are prescribed by the Leke or Book of Rites. To disobey the least rule of this great national manual is a crime, and a severely punished one.

In two respects only does one Chinese funeral differ from another. The first is in the amount of money spent, and the second is in the period after death at which burial takes place.

The first ambition of every Chinaman is to have a splendid coffin. A poor Chinaman will half starve himself and his family for years that he may daily hoard a few cash toward the sum needed for the purchase of the coveted casket. When the coffin is really bought, it is brought home with great ceremony. It is given the place of honour in the house, and is regarded as the most valuable piece of furniture in the establishment. Often a pious son will sell himself into slavery that he may buy and present to his father an exceptionally handsome coffin. Such acts of filial piety rarely go unrewarded by the Government. The obedience of children to parents is so much the central idea of Chinese life, and upon it so largely depends the safety of the Chinese Government, that that Government, being one of the most astute and painstaking in the world, misses no opportunity of strengthening the idea of filial obedience in the Chinese mind, either en masse or singly. Among the poorer classes it is customary to buy a very thick coffin. No self-respecting Chinese family (and the Chinese are the most self-respecting of all the nations) will bury a parent until they can do so with more or less Mongolian magnificence; hence, in China, death by no means implies immediate burial. When a Chinaman dies his neighbours come in and help the women of the family to make the shroud. The body is put in its coffin, then the funeral ceremonies begin, if there is money enough. If there is not, the coffin is put back in its place of honour until the family finances look up. That is something that occasionally takes time in Europe. In China money is acquired more slowly; the coffined body often awaits adequately-ceremonied burial for twenty or thirty years. I need not, I think, dwell upon the grave necessity under such circumstances for a very thick, air-tight coffin. Often a Chinese funeral entails the additional expense of a long journey. A Chinaman will leave his father unburied rather than inter him anywhere but in the tombs of his ancestors, which may be in the most distant part of China, for Ah Foong is rather a traveller.

The day of the death or the day after, the relatives not living in the house and the friends come to pay the last duties or respect to the deceased. When the visitors arrive they are shown into a room in which are all the women and children of the establishment. These latter set up a dismal howl, in which the visitors join, or to which they listen sympathetically. When the tympanum of even a Chinese ear begins to ache, the guests are ushered into another apartment, where the men of the house give them tea and refreshment. The refreshment varies according to the means of the family. In the house of the rich it is a dinner. After the visitors have drank and eaten they are bowed out by one of the kinsmen of the dead.

The dinner of Chinese affluence, wherever, whyever it is served, consists of five courses—

The first four courses are eaten with chop-sticks, the last course is eaten with the fingers; and is not that the way that fruit always should be eaten? Everything in the first four courses is served superlatively hot. Except a Chinaman is starving he will not eat cooked food unless it is bubbling hot. I except sweetmeats; and yet he eats the most incredible quantities of ice. Wine is served with all the courses—served hot. It is not intoxicating, and has, to my palate, a very pleasant taste. I used to dine in America with some people who were just a bit mad on the temperance question. One day they gave me unfermented wine; it was an awful moment! But the Chinese dinner-giver knows the secret of keeping his guests free from the possible ill effects of alcohol without making himself ridiculous.

At a correct Chinese dinner the women look on from behind a trellis work. The Chinese hold that the seat of the human understanding is the stomach.

A well-conducted Chinese funeral is the most gorgeous sight in Asia. It may seem to us a little tinselly, but that is a mere matter of taste; but I, who make bold to like the Chinese, can’t claim that they have in all things a superabundance of taste.

At the front of the funeral procession walk the noisy, musicless musicians; then come men (they may be friends, they may be coolies) bearing the insignia of the dignity of the dead, if he had any. Next walk more men carrying figures of animals, idols, umbrellas, and blue and white streamers. After them come men carrying pans of perfume. Just before the coffin walk bonzes—Chinese priests. Over the coffin a canopy is usually carried. The casket is borne by about a score of men. Immediately after the coffin walk the children of the deceased. The eldest son comes first. He is dressed in canvas and leans heavily upon a stout stick. He is supposed to be too exhausted by grief and fasting to walk without the aid of this staff. The other children and relatives follow this chief mourner. They are clothed in white linen garments. White is the mourning colour of the Danes and of the Chinese. The women are carried in chairs in the Chinese funeral procession. They sob and wail at intervals and in unison.

A Chinese funeral procession always has a long way to go. The burying-places are invariably some distance from the town or village. Usually they are on a high place. Pines and cypresses are planted about them if possible. The dead are supposed to be pleased at having a pleasant situation for their graves. When a Chinese family has persistent bad luck it is usual for them to shift the bones of their ancestors to a more desirable place.

When the burying-place is reached the bonzes begin chanting a mass for the dead, and the coffin is put into the tomb. When the coffin is laid in its final position, a large, oblong, white marble table is placed before the tomb. On the middle of it is set a censor and two vases and two candlesticks, all of as exquisite workmanship as possible. Then they have a paper cremation; paper figures of men and horses, garments, and a score of other things are burned. These are supposed to undergo a material resurrection and to be useful to the dead in the Chinese heaven. The tomb is sealed up or closed, and an entertainment concludes the ceremony at the grave.

The forms of Chinese tombs vary somewhat, according to the province in which they are built, and very much according to the means of the relative who undertakes the expense. With the very poor the coffin is placed upon the ground, earth and lime are packed about it, and a rude grave is formed. With the rich a vault is built, in the form of a horse-shoe. If the dead was of note or position, the decorations of the grave and of the coffin are very elaborate. There are a thousand interesting things to be said about Chinese mourning, about the ceremonies commemorative of the dead, and about the funerals of the Chinese Royal Family. But they can’t be put into a paragraph, nor on to a page. So I leave them.

Chinese religion is so secondary an affair that it is inconsistent. Theoretically, some of them believe in immortality. In reality, I believe them to be the veriest materialists, quite devoid of a belief in an after-life. And yet they periodically carry food to the graves of their ancestors.

The Chinese are touchingly fanatic in their love of home. China is so over-productive of human life that a fearful number of the Chinese are uncomfortable from their birth till their death. That is the only reason that we sometimes see, as I did yesterday, a red-button mandarin on the streets of London, and the sole reason that half San Francisco’s soiled linen is washed by Chinamen. But wherever they go, they carry their coffins with them. They hope to die in China, but, if by accident or misfortune, they die in Europe, in America, or in Australia, their last prayer is that they may rest in a Chinese grave.

ORIENTAL NUPTIALS

Chinese Espousals

There are no marriages in China for a hundred days following the death of an Emperor. But on all other days, marriage processions of various degrees of gorgeousness follow each other along the streets in interminable succession.

Theoretically the Emperor is the only Chinaman who sees the face of his wife before their marriage. As a matter of fact, in the poorer classes, boys and girls grow up together, play together, work together, and fall in love with each other. And even in the richer classes, where poverty does not drive the girls into public view, love matches are not so very uncommon. Chinese literature is replete with love stories. And the love poems of China are remarkable from a human point as much as from a Mongolian.

The most important marriages that ever take place in China are the marriages of the Emperor. To those marriages every daughter of every Chinese grandee aspires. When the Emperor ascends the throne, the grandees of the court bring to him all their unmarried daughters. He selects all that please him, and the chosen girls rejoice together.

The Emperor of China never allies himself, directly or indirectly, with any foreign prince. The Chinese Royal Family is purely Chinese. The daughters of the Emperor are often given in marriage to favourite mandarins. The family that can furnish his Majesty with one of his many wives—the family that can form an alliance with one of the sovereign’s daughters—is sure to gain great influence and power, and to be loaded with many honours. There is no limit to the number of an Emperor’s wives, except the limit placed by his own apathy. He is a very absolute monarch indeed, is the Emperor of China. There is, among the countless millions of his subjects, one person only who may dare to differ from him, to admonish him, or even to urgently advise him,—his mother. There are two things in China mightier than the Emperor of China: the mother of the Emperor and public opinion. He must heed both, if they speak emphatically enough.

But among his Majesty’s many wives there is one who is chief. She is called Hrang-Hou. She is the Empress; she enjoys peculiar prerogatives; she is usually a person of vast influence. The wives of a Chinese Emperor are securely shut in a palace of their own. They hold no communication with the outer world. The outer world sees nothing of them; but they see China, very much as the people of a country village often see the world—through a cheap stereoscope. If a wife of the Emperor expresses curiosity about some famous city, a miniature representation of that city is probably built in the palace park. Which is one way of making the mountain come to Mohammed, is it not? The wives of the Emperor are often allowed to sit behind gratings and watch ceremonies and feasts. They are lavishly supplied with everything except freedom, general society, and feet. I fancy that they are all well educated. I have never known the wife of a Chinese Emperor; but I have known Chinese women of lesser rank who were positively highly educated. And nowhere is education more valued—its power more understood—than in China. Nowhere is education more valuable, for in China a man’s rank depends solely upon what he can do or has done. It is most probable that the grandees, who may aspire to bestow their daughters upon the Emperor, give those daughters—from whose influence they hope so much—every possible advantage of education.

Chinese widows re-marry, but the practice is not held in high repute. The widows of the Emperor can never re-marry. Upon his death they are removed to a building which stands within the palace precincts. It is called the Palace of Chastity. There the widows of the Emperor—with the possible exception of her who is now the Empress Mother—must live and die. But they are held in the greatest honour, treated with the greatest respect and consideration.

The favourite wife of a Chinese Emperor is a very potential lady, and she is rather apt to retain her power. She is beautiful, according to Chinese standards of beauty, or the Emperor would never have chosen her. She is most probably a woman of unusual culture and education. She is very possibly a woman of intellect; for she is a grandee’s daughter, and no meagrely-minded man attains to grandeeship in China. And it goes without saying that she is the best-dressed woman in China. She has nothing to do but welcome the suzerain and to please him. She belongs to no society for the advancement of her own sex. She may not even write to the daily papers; but she is rather warmly liked by her royal master-husband for all that. And many a Chinese Emperor has been in despair at the death of his favourite wife. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the Emperor Chun-Chee, who was the founder of the present dynasty, sacrificed, at the tomb of his favourite wife, thirty odd slaves. That was a nice little post-mortem custom; but it has died out. Paper men are now burnt at Chinese graves, that the spirit of the dead may not lack servants in the after-life. And yet, as far as I could find out, but few Chinamen really believe in an after-life. What a strange inconsistency on the part of a people usually so consistent!

I have said that only the Emperor’s mother dare cross the Emperor’s will. But only the God of Marriage knows what battles are fought and won within those closely-guarded palace gardens, when the sovereign visits his wives. I have very little faith in the powerlessness of lock-and-keyed wives. In India I knew a Maharajah who was abjectly afraid of his purdahed Maharanee’s sharp little tongue.

China is a huge place. Though customs are essentially the same all over China, some of them are greatly differentiated in detail. This is probably one reason that almost all English written accounts of Chinese weddings differ markedly. I fancy that a greater reason is that the almost impregnable reticence of the Chinese makes it very difficult for an Occidental to definitely learn much concerning the fundamental customs of Chinese life.

The age is very variable at which Chinese marriages are contracted. I have seen Chinese brides of very tender years, and I have seen Chinese brides who looked positively mature.

Ordinarily a Chinaman buys his wife. He does not see her (or is supposed not to see her) until the marriage; but his women representatives have a good long look at her and report to him, or to his parents, if those are still living. If all the preliminary details are satisfactorily arranged, the bargain is concluded. The bridegroom pays the bride’s parents the stipulated “wife-price.” He retires to his own house and there awaits his unseen bride. She is placed in a closed palanquin, a fantastic sedan chair, which is carried at the end or in the centre of the bridal procession. This procession is as elaborate as the means of the contracting families will permit, and as grotesque as Chinese fancy can invent. In it are lanterns, musical instruments, fans, umbrellas, insignia of rank, and covered tables on which are roast pigs and a hundred and one Chinese dainties. The bearers of all these ornaments and symbols are clad in bright red, or at least wear red jackets. The musicians play, the crowd shouts, in sing-song Chinese fashion, and the two bridesmaids proudly follow the sedan chair. The chair is locked and the key is carried by a trusted servant. The bridegroom waits at his own gate, clad in his dress of ceremony. A Chinese dress of ceremony is a most remarkable collection of remarkable garments; its colours and many of its details depend entirely upon the rank of its wearer. The key of the palanquin is handed to the bridegroom. He presses forward; the crowd draws back; the bridegroom unlocks the palanquin and looks at its contents. If he is pleased, he leads his bride into his house and the marriage is celebrated. If the bridegroom is disappointed, the bride is sent back to her parents and there is no wedding. But in that case the bridegroom that was to have been, must pay the girl’s parents a sum equal to the sum for which he bought her. Even after the marriage the wife can be divorced and returned to her parents upon payment of a sum identical with the “wife money” which was her first price. The causes for divorce with which the Chinese popular mind is most sympathetic are those that arise from the misrepresentation of the bride by her parents. If she is less attractive in face or figure than she was said to be—above all, if she has larger feet—every Chinaman is justified, to the popular mind, in divorcing his wife.

If the bridegroom is pleased and the bride goes in, the friends follow and a gigantic feast is offered and accepted. The marriage ceremony itself is far less important, I believe, to the Chinese mind than the marriage feast. The marriage ceremonies of almost all the Oriental peoples are strangely alike. The chief detail of the Chinese marriage ritual is, I understand, the tying together of bride and bridegroom. Scarlet strings fasten them together, waist to waist and foot to foot.

Nothing seems to me more difficult of description than the position of woman in China. As I have so often said, reliable and precise information is so hard to obtain. But more than that, the position of woman in China is so complex. As a wife she is placed beneath her husband and is subservient to him, because the Chinese regard the female as inferior to the male. As a mother she is placed above her son, and he is subservient to her, because the Chinese regard the parent as superior to the child. But with the Chinese the superiority of parentage is far greater than any possible superiority of sex.

My observation in China was, necessarily, limited, but it was very earnest. It was my observation that the Chinese men were not unkind to the Chinese women. I spent some time among the water populations of Hong-Kong and Canton. In both of those cities incredible thousands live in the crudest native boats,—live in sampans. They seemed very happy, contented little families, despite their dire poverty. The women worked hard, but they were certainly consulted about every family matter. I never saw a race of women who struck me as being less cowed. I often used to watch them at their wretched meals; it was share and share alike, with the nicer share for the wife and the tidbits for the baby. It is true that among the poorer classes of the Chinese the women do tremendously hard work; but it is also true that they are tremendously strong. It is as true that women are forced to stupendous labour wherever poverty is more the rule than the exception. The Chinese women of the coolie class labour in the fields, they break stones on the streets of Hong-Kong, they carry heavy boxes on and off the boats that anchor in the Canton river,—but they are not ciphers in their own families. I do not believe that they are ever cuffed; I doubt if they are ever cursed.

A Chinese gentleman is superlatively polite. This may not be generally known, because the upper classes in China are so reluctant to know us or to let us know them. But it is true. We know one Chinese family of rank rather well; we have eaten with the men of the family and with the women. Truth compels me to mention that the gentleman of the house had two wives. Whether they ordinarily ate with him I do not know. I fancy that their doing so when we were there was an act of consideration for me; yet I am not sure, for they were easy and self-possessed. And this I do know, that the men of the house were most unfailingly courteous to them. I believe that, on the whole, Mongolian married life is very fairly satisfactory to the Mongolians. If they are satisfied, why, in the name of reasonableness, should they be disturbed? If the women of the upper classes are not always, or even often, supreme in their home lives, they are at least secure of deferential and courteous treatment. One of the chief proverbs of China—and I thought it a delightful one—is, “You must listen to your wife, but not believe her.”

CHINESE SHOES

The Chinese women have enormous feet. They are reputed “small footed,” but our reputations often wrong us. No Chinese woman has a small foot. But even a Chinese woman’s huge great toe looks small when in its solitary deformity it masquerades as an entire foot.

There is nothing so characteristic of the Chinese as thoroughness. The Chinese are the least beautiful of all civilised peoples; but when they undertake to be beautiful—even in the mere matter of their women’s feet—they do it thoroughly. They don’t put a heel in the middle of a shoe to make a foot look small, nor do they point absurdly an empty satin toe. No! They bend four of the human toes back and leave the one big toe to do apparent duty as a lovely, diminutive foot.

To us the small-footed women of China appear twofold martyrs. We think them martyrs because they suffer when the foot deformity is inflicted upon them. We think them martyrs because their deformed feet are useless, and disable them from taking exercise.

We regard exercise as a blessed privilege. The Chinese regard exercise as a dire necessity.

We, in the West, do most things because we like; they, in the East, do most things because they must.

That makes the great racial difference. It is not often justly appreciated. Ignoring it causes us to do the people of Asia innumerable injustices.

Chinese women know as little of tennis, of golf, of riding to hounds—even of dancing in its fast and furious Western sense—as we know of fish-eye soup and of birds’-nest stew. And they care less.

The majority of Chinese women whose feet are bound endure temporary pain, but they suffer no permanent deprivation. To take voluntary and unnecessary exercise—to take it as a pleasure—could never occur to a well-balanced Chinese mind. The NirvÂna of which the Brahmins dream is the idleness which the most favoured-by-fortune of the Chinese women realise.

Milton might have written of the small-footed women of China (had he known them—had he felt an interest in them), ‘They also serve who only sit and wait.’ They serve indeed a great racial purpose of repose as they sit and wait for an Occidental enlightenment for which they have no desire.

The Chinese are the hardest working, the most indefatigable race on earth. Consequently the grandes dames of old Cathay do even less material work than the leisured women of any other country.

Nature is the great giver of recompense; Nature saves us from universal insanity; Nature whispers in the ear of the tired, overworked Chinaman, “Rest is the superlative form of happiness. To be idle is to be in paradise.”

The Chinese bind the feet of their women not out of cruelty; they do it partly out of a deformed, over-civilised, national vanity, but still more out of a tender kindness. The woman whose feet are “small” can perform no great physical labour; she cannot trudge beneath the burning sun to tend the young rice plants; nor can she pole the heavy sampans up and down the crowded Chinese rivers.

The Chinese do not incapacitate their chosen women from enjoyment but from hardship. It is often said and printed in the West that the feet of the women of the Chinese nobility are bound, and that the feet of the peasant women are left unbound. It has been said that you can learn a Chinese woman’s rank from her feet. I have even seen it recorded in good, honest-looking type that the feet of all the Chinese women are bound.

Excepting only the descendants of Confucius there is no Chinese nobility, save the momentary nobility of personal merit. A mandarin who is “noble” because he is able is most probably rich; being rich he can afford to bind the feet of his daughter. There is no necessity for her to work. He can go further; he can secure her in perpetual idleness. Her feet are bound, and her bowl of rice is placed before her; she need never earn it by the sweat of her pretty little yellow brow.

How the preposterous notion that the feet of all Chinese women are bound ever entered the most stupid Occidental head is inconceivable. I suppose that it occurred on the same intellectual principle that impelled a San Francisco friend to say to me, “You need not tell me there’s any good in any of the Chinese, for I just know there ain’t. I know two Johns; they do my washing. They’re both thieves, they both lie, and they both gamble.”

In the poorer class (we can scarcely use the word peasant of a people by all of whom the highest nobility is attainable)—in the poorer class there is apt to be one small-footed girl in each family. If they can see their combined way to support her, the feet of the prettiest girl are bound. Don’t fancy that she resents it. She is delighted. She does only light work after that. She brings a better price in the vast Mongolian marriage market. Haply, she will, in future, be able to aid and recompense her devoted family. At the worst, they have the satisfaction of feeling that they have rescued one of their own flesh and blood from the seething, sweating struggle for Chinese existence.

Chinese shoemakers are supreme. They are an economy and a delight to every European woman who lives in Asia. Their work is swift, deft, and faultless! Their bills are charmingly little. In spite of the hard times I am beautifully shod to-day, thanks to a little yellow man who lives on Bentick Street in Calcutta. I forget his name, but I send him a very hearty chin-chin. Difficulties may arise with my landlord and my coal-merchant; but I am strong on my feet. I have a box full of lovely shoes and slippers; the most expensive pair cost me six rupees. As a rule I furnished the satin and paid my cobbler one rupee. I was with a friend yesterday, when she bought herself a pair of French boots. I saw her purse bleed gold, and my heart was full with kind thoughts of my Chinese shoemaker.

In nothing are the Chinese more thorough than in their stoicism. I only saw, well, one Chinese hospital; I never had the courage to go into another. In Hong-Kong a friend who was attached to the English Hospital took me through it and through the Tung Wah Hospital.

The English Hospital was a great cool place of succour, of comfort, and of alleviation. The Chinese Hospital was a house of horror. There was system, but I saw no comfort. The Chinese gentleman who accompanied me told me that the beds were bare boards because the patients were used to nothing else and would like nothing else. Why the insane ward was as it was he did not explain. Indeed I went into the insane “ward” alone; my two escorts waited at the door. There were several good and sufficient reasons for this.

In the pharmacy all seemed excellently ordered. We might, I believe, learn from the Chinese much of great medical value; their drugs, their instruments, and their therapeutics all deserve trained and competent study.

The Chinaman dreads the knife as he dreads nothing else; and yet of recent years China has made great strides in surgery. The Chinese pharmacopoeia is, I fancy, exceptionally rich, and includes many potent, efficacious herbs of which we know nothing.

I ought, in justice, to say that the Tung Wah Hospital was clean. It was very clean,—but it was beyond words dreary. It was a cruel place. The sick and the sick-unto-death lay, I thought, absolutely without sympathy, certainly without creature comforts. But there, it is so easy for ignorance to be critical, so impossible for it to criticise justly. Possibly those poor creatures would have resented the sympathy and have refused the comforts. So, at least, I was told. I tried to be fair. But I went out of the handsome carving-decked waiting-room very troubled about the Tung Wah Hospital, and very sure that its insane ward was a disgrace to an island over which the English flag floated.

From the Tung Wah Hospital we went on and up, until we passed through the pretty lodge of the English Hospital. It was a huge house of mercy. And the pretty brown-eyed Sister who smiled me welcome to the first ward had English roses at her belt.

The Chinese are heroically thorough in their struggle for existence. China has an enormous water population. I forget how many thousands or tens of thousands live in the sampans of Hong-Kong and Canton; but the number is gigantic. I made friends in Hong-Kong with a woman who was born on a sampan, who was married from a sampan to a sampan man, and who had, in the short sanctity of her husband’s sampan, been seven times a mother. She had never spent five consecutive hours out of a sampan. Her loves and hates, her distastes and her appetites, her fears and her ambitions, were all bounded by the primitive walls of a Hong-Kong sampan.

When you think of partly English Hong-Kong in all its regal beauty, when you think of wholly Mongolian Canton in all its super-Asiatic density, think of them with an outer scum—a scum of poverty, a scum of sampans. China, the prolific, has overflowed into the yellow Chinese sea, and it is greatly to the credit of the Chinese overflow that it has found life both palatable and practicable. I saw in China nothing more wonderful than the modus vivendi of the sampan people. They do all that men must do on board their crude, diminutive barks. Nevertheless, they keep the boats scrupulously clean and very much at the service of any European who will exchange a few sen for a long, soft float on the swelling Chinese sea.

Nature herself is thorough in China. When it rains on Hong-Kong, the island is drenched with a wet splendour that dwarfs into a mere mist all the rains that ever fell on Europe. The last time that we were in Hong-Kong it rained incessantly. Between the steamer and the hotel our boxes were thoroughly drenched. I was very cross when my poor trunks were opened, and my maid wept, probably because she foresaw damp, additional labour. We secured an extra room, and every effort was made to remove the stain of Anne Nevill’s black velvet from Pauline Deschappelle’s white bridal satin. But alas, the trailing stain of the Chinese rains was over them all, and I am still the chagrined possessor of sundry costly gowns that are not the colour they were, because they have been soaked by the unexaggeratable torrents of the Chinese storms. The rain came down, the rain came across, the rain seemed to come up from the seething earth.

My thickening manuscript cries to me, “Halt.” I have left unsaid almost all that I ought to have said of China, had my information and my capacity been less meagre. And in the sheerest gratitude I should have chronicled more that one feast on the Peak, and recorded how sweetly the Argyll and Sutherlanders played Annie Laurie, and how potent their uniforms looked against the vivid background of the green Chinese flora.

There are sentences, or rather might be sentences, I long to write—sentences unique with Slavic words and Tartar phraseology—sentences descriptive of the Russian seamen who ’rickshawed through Hong-Kong while the Tsarevitz was peeping at Canton.

The Russian men-of-war were too bulky to slip up the narrow Canton rivers. The Tsarevitz accepted the locomotion of a smaller boat, and the Russian sailors held in Hong-Kong high holiday.

From Hong-Kong we sent back to Australia about half of our artistic corps. We were, as we thought, soon going home to England. My husband wished our departing fellows God-speed and a glad return to their Antipodean homes. I tried to wring Jimmie MacAllister’s huge hand; and I wiped my eyes as the big ship carried him back to the land of the Southern Cross—carried him away from the green hills of Hong-Kong, where the red flowers of China flashed upon the gray walls of the English Barracks.

Of the amateurs who filled up our depleted ranks, I will say nothing, because nothing that I could say would be enough.

I believe that I am a wiser woman for having lived in China. Certainly I am a happier.

There is, I think, if I may say it again, no other civilised country that we misunderstand and misjudge as we do China. There is, I emphatically believe, no other nation so worthy, as are the Chinese, of our sympathy and respect.

JAPANESE TOUCH

With the Japanese art is an inspiration. They are incapable of bad taste in art. If their work is not always great, it is always fine. It sometimes lacks depth, it never lacks grace.

Lightness of touch, exactness of touch, characterise all Japanese work; but it would be grossly untrue to say that all Japanese work lacks strength, depth, and force. Much that the Japanese do, they do “from the shoulder.” Their cloisonnÉ is rich, their carvings are masterly, and on the stages of their theatres I have seen handling of group-masses that was powerful in the extreme.

But finish and delicacy are the most general characteristics of all Japanese work. Even when the Japanese are positively bold in design and execution, it is so well bred a boldness that we are apt to lose sight of it, and be absorbed in admiration of the details.

Japanese finish is so extreme that it is almost veneer. The Japanese are as polished as their own lacquers; and all their work is a reflection of themselves.

Art and Nature are at their loveliest in Japan. Nowhere else is Nature so artistic. Perhaps because nowhere else does there dwell a people so intensely sympathetic with Nature. In Japan the scenery is so perfect that we almost suspect it of being studied. And the Japanese architecture—of hut or of temple—is so appropriate to its background, so fits the landscape, that we feel that both have been arranged by the same master-hand.

No other people can boast an art that breaks into so many lines of beauty, and that smiles with such sweet wealth of colour-harmony. But there are parts of the globe where both Art and Nature seize upon us more quickly and hold us more powerfully.

In the Alps, in the Sierra Nevadas, in Tasmania, in Gippsland, in the Himalayas, Nature takes you by the shoulders and shakes you—shakes a soul into you if you never had one before.

In Japan, Nature has vines and blossoms in her hair, and wine on her lips. She smiles into your face. She stretches out to you her warm, dimpled arms. She has bewitched you. You may tear yourself away from her, but you will never forget her. She will haunt you in your London club; and when you are deer-stalking in Scotland or yachting in the Norway fiords you will close your eyes sometimes and feel once more upon your cheeks the perfume of her breath. Her beauty has mastered you. You love her, with a light love, perhaps, but then, alas, the light loves are the loves that last. You have escaped to honest English civilisation and to Regent Street, but to the day of your death you will long to go back to the gentle, scented embrace of the blithe Nature that laughs and rollicks and lavishes her myriad beauties on Japan.

I have seen strong men weep in Dresden and in Rome, moved to a new emotion by some gigantic achievement of Occidental art,—an achievement that was great, but far from faultless. The great proportion of Japanese art is faultless, but far from great.

After all, I have no right to decide what constitutes greatness. Is a forest greater than a maple leaf? I doubt it. Art is so infinite,—all artists are so finite! The artists of Japan embroider with their pencils, and paint with their needles. They follow their own art ideal. Because it appeals to us less, it is not necessarily a smaller ideal than our own.

The very delicacy of touch and mind that makes the Japanese the most exquisite of all workmen, makes them the most sensitive of all peoples, the most petulantly resentful of criticism. I fear that it would be impossible for a European to write an article about Japan that would be inoffensive to the Japanese, unless it were an article of unqualified praise.

We reached Nagasaki in the early daylight. So should one always first see Japan. To touch the shores of Japan in the dawning, to begin a new day and a new exquisite experience, to steal with the sun into Nagasaki; that is something to remember for ever, with gratitude. As we approached Nagasaki it looked like a collection of cheerful Orientalised Swiss chalets.

Nagasaki nestles against the hilly side of fair, green Kiu-siu like a quaint burr clinging to the petal of a huge, lovely flower.

Japan in many parts is not unlike Switzerland—Switzerland grown warm and comfortable, Switzerland reduced to a minute scale, Switzerland burst into myriad bloom and softened into a new and gentle beauty. The sun lit up the island more clearly as we stepped into the clean, little, canoe-like tug that came to take us ashore.

A long line of ’rickshaws, as impatient as prancing horses, stood at the low, sandy landing-place. Hundreds of quaintly-clad, bright-eyed people, brown-skinned and buff, were moving daintily about the delicate scene.

Over a very serious, but a rather lazy-looking wooden building floated the Stars and Stripes, and the Union-Jack-adorned British Consulate looked as eminently respectable and as unpicturesque as did the official residence of the American Consul.

Our family divided into three parties when we were well ashore. I was the only adult wicked enough to ride behind a “human horse.” My husband went to call at the Consulates, and to inspect the theatre, at which we intended to play on our return. And Nurse marched bravely off, leading the boy bairn, and followed by the wee girl bairn, who looked like a great human snowball in the arms of black John the Madrassi.

I made a bargain with a sturdy, cheerful-looking jinrickshaw coolie, who spoke good English and better French, and he started off into the heart of bright, busy Nagasaki.

That coolie was a genius. And, unlike many genii, he had not mistaken his avocation. He was a capital cicerone. He rang, or rather ran, the changes on the Nagasaki sights in the deftest and most admirable way. From the choicest shops to the queerest temple, from beside the jolliest little vine-hung stream into the densest coolie quarter, for seven hours he directed my travels in a masterly manner. And just when the captain (so he afterwards told me) was almost beginning to use inelegant English, the clever little native whirled me down to the shore, bowed me into a tug, clapped his hands, laughed, and cried, “Sayonara.”

I do not know what delighted me most in Nagasaki I never knew what delighted me most in Japan, it was all so delightful. Nagasaki was the first bit of Japan I ever saw. I found in it a new charm. China was to me like the land of the mighty magicians; Japan was fairyland.

The Japanese islands are running over with flowers. The Japanese temples are a-tinkle with the music of bells. The soft-voiced people walk among the blossoms, and their fine faces are aglow with the love of beauty, and they themselves are innocently intoxicated with the delight of living.

Nagasaki is so sweetly clean that one cannot wonder that tourists who spend a few hours there rush back to their boats and write to the journals of Europe and America that the Japanese are the cleanest people on earth. I thought that the first day I was in Nagasaki. Alas, I learned better in a dozen other Japanese cities!

It was in Nagasaki that I first felt the full force of Japanese courtesy. My husband lunched in an elaborate fashion with friends at the hotel, but I begged off and spent all of my seven hours in investigating Nagasaki. When my coolie thought I had fasted long enough, he dropped the shafts of the ’rickshaw and ran into a droll little papier-machÉ looking house that was perched on the hilly highway, midway between the cemetery and the bamboo-bridged streamlet. In a few moments he came back carrying a tea-tray, and followed by a half-grown girl, who had cakes and fruit in a lacquer basket. An old woman toddled after, and spread a paper napkin on my lap. I enjoyed my al fresco lunch very much, as I sat in the ’rickshaw; the sunshine danced about me, but I was cool under the shade of an immense plum tree. They brought me a strange copper bowl, filled with warm water, and when I had paid the reasonable bill, we went back to the little paradise of shops.

The great works of Western art move us to awe. Upon Europeans the universal effect of Japanese works of art is a mad, insatiable desire to possess. Very good people long to buy. I am not very good; my enemies say that I am not good at all. Certainly, until my money gave out I longed to buy everything I saw in Japan. But when my money gave out, as it soon did, my one desire was to steal. I do not remember that I ever did steal anything in Japan, but I often wanted to do so. And my husband says that he mysteriously lost a hundred yen in Yokohama.

European art—if it is great art—holds us at a distance. Japanese art woos us; we long to own it—to stroke it. Japanese art is as approachable as it is fine. Occidental art keeps us in our place.

I saw Nagasaki again, when we were leaving Japan. Again our ship stopped there for a few hours. We played Hamlet there; it was an ethereal experience—a fitting end of our stay in the daintiest, prettiest, most mannerly country on the globe. We walked through the moonlight to the theatre. The streets were silent, save for the plaintive whistle of the blind shampooers. It sounded doubly sad to me as I realised that possibly I should never hear it again.

I have often wondered what Ophelia would have said could she have seen half the strange flowers I have worn in her name. Cowboys have brought me the wild flowers of their wilder West (it was my wild West too). Maharanees have sent me scented roses from behind purdahed gardens. Gold kings and silver paupers have sent me soft flannel flowers, and pink colonial roses from the Australian bush,—in all the quarters of the globe I have been the recipient of the perfumed tribute paid to me because I represented, however unworthily, the sweet, meek maiden who was the genius-born daughter of Shakespeare’s pen.

In Nagasaki we had a paucity of scenery; but I had a wealth of flowers for the “mad scene,” and as I wreathed the wistaria and the honeysuckle with the pompom-like chrysanthemums, the Japanese lilies, and the matchless roses, I almost wept over them my farewell to Japan.

In the late starlight we went back from the theatre to the boat. Japan was almost hidden by the night. We stole into Japan in the dawning; we stole out of Japan in the midnight dusk. Fit beginning, fit end of an experience almost too exquisitely beautiful to be a reality,—an experience of which I shall always think as of a Heaven-sent dream.

But between the early morning when the beauty of Japan dawned upon us, and the night in whose deep dusk we lost sight of the incomparably lovely islands, we had many weeks of rare delight,—weeks spent in Hondo.

The little voyage up the “Inland Sea” was well-nigh marvellous. The lakes and the mountains were as intricate as a Chinese puzzle, and as beautiful as we fancy the Garden of Eden.

Kobe—the Hiogo of yore—broke the sylvan panorama of our sail and Fusiyama accented it. Fusiyama rose between the green Japanese hills and the blue Japanese sky like a white point of holy exclamation. It was dormant, but a dozen lesser volcanoes threw up tongues of flame as we passed.

In Kobe we found old friends—friends from London, from Boston, and from Nevada. We found shelter in a cosy, well-cuisined hotel, and its presiding genius had once been our Boniface in Montano. We were given great hospitality in Kobe. We made some charming Japanese friends. I revelled in the Japanese shops. And the fierce, rainy day that we sailed for Yokohama, I was given such a roll of sumptuous black satin, on which wonderfully skilled Japanese fingers had embroidered great clusters of purple fleur-de-lis!

FOUR WOMEN THAT I KNEW IN TOKIO

Mrs. Keutako

Three of them were Japanese. One was the Anglo-Saxon wife of a Japanese gentleman. Two of them I had known in America. Two of them I met for the first time in Japan.

The two girls whom I knew at Vassar College as Stamatz Yamakawa and Shige Nagai had become the Countess Oyama and Mrs. Uriu. My new acquaintances were Mrs. Keutako and Madame Sannomiya. Mrs. Keutako was a dear bit of Japanese femininity whom I always longed to seize upon and cuddle. We were really very good friends, though our conversation was very limited. She knew two words of English. I had the advantage of her inasmuch as I knew three words of Japanese.

Madame Sannomiya was one of the most powerful personalities of the Japanese Court; she was English, but her husband was a high functionary of the Mikado’s household. I called upon her with no vouchment but that of a few common acquaintances. I went to ask her kindly offices for a performance of the Merchant of Venice we were ambitious to give before the Emperor. The attempt upon the life of the Tsarevitz threw the Japanese Court into a trembling, mortified state of chagrin that doomed our little plan. But I gained the acquaintance of one of the most uniquely interesting women I ever met.

The four women of whom I am writing were, I believe, rather familiarly acquainted, because they were all, more or less, habituÉs of the Imperial palace. The differentiation of their individualities could scarcely have been sharper.

We reached Yokohama one night after dark. When I woke in the early morning I dressed quickly and went out for a ramble alone,—as I love to do in a new place. I felt as if I had fallen asleep and dreamed of a fairy land peopled by the figures off my best tea-cups and off my summer fans. Japan is perpetually blessed with an atmosphere as clear as crystal, as soft as down, and as sweet as incense. Nature loves Japan with the tender, yearning love of a mother for a favourite child. On Japan Nature lavishes her most fragrant verdure and her utmost picturesqueness of life. And, to end, she touches the picture she has made with some delicate trail of graceful vine, some matchless slope of hillside. She adds to the figures on the canvas the seductive witchery of unrivalled eyes, the grace of perfect manner; and the people of her favourite country echo her. The Japanese peasant, who sits upon the floor to suck his meal of raw eggs, has a handful of superb flowers in a graceful vase; and the floor upon which he sits is white and clean. But, as I was to learn, Yokohama is nothing to Tokio. You meet Europeans in almost every street in Yokohama. I have been days in Tokio without seeing a European. There are, I believe, only six European ladies resident in Tokio, and proportionately few European men.

It was in Yokohama that I first met Mrs. Keutako. My husband had mailed a letter of introduction to Mr. Keutako only that morning, and had added a line, saying, “My wife and I are coming to Tokio for a few days next week, and I shall give myself the pleasure of calling upon you.” The response was very prompt and very Japanese. It was this: a basket of beautiful roses was brought to my dressing-room that night, with a card on which was written in English, “With Mrs. Henrico Keutako’s compliments and welcome.” When the curtain rose we saw in the front row a Japanese gentleman in European evening dress; beside him sat a breathing Japanese doll, with glancing, dancing eyes, and brave with exquisite Japanese raiment.

We sent out a note begging them to have supper with us after the play. When the curtain fell Mr. Paulding brought them on to the stage. How the dear little woman bowed; then she laughed and patted my hand, put her dainty finger on her lips, and shook her head. I bore her off in triumph to my room. Mr. Keutako was a Harvard graduate, and had spent some years in England. We could hear him and my husband talking in the next room. But I don’t believe they enjoyed themselves as much as we did. My guest took a wild, childish delight in everything. She tried on my rings and made me try on hers; she tried on several pairs of my slippers; she was greatly amused at my hare’s foot; she pantomimed to me to “make her up”; she was in an ecstasy over my blonde wig. The only English she knew was “Thank you,” but she said it over and over. While she was investigating all my little belongings, I looked at her. She was dainty and little, of course. Her skin was a few shades darker than mine; her black hair was dressed with extreme Japanese elaborateness; she was clad in robes of pale-blue and pale-pink crÊpe, and an outer robe of rich brown satin dotted sparsely with pale-blue flowers and lined with pale-pink silk. Her obi was of black and silver, and was fastened in front with three or four flashing diamonds. She wore four or five more fine diamonds on her pretty hands, and a big turquoise, that must have felt very heavy on the wee finger. She wore a deep-red rose at her throat. On the shoulder of her kimono was embroidered her coat-of-arms; that is a custom with the Japanese of gentle birth on state or semi-state occasions. She had paid me the compliment of wearing one of her Court kimonos, though I didn’t know it at the time. She wore segregated white-silk stockings. She had thrown off her shoes before she would come into my untidy little den. The only European detail of her attire (except the fashion of her rings) was a sheer white handkerchief edged with Valenciennes. I think it was rather an innovation, for she kept drawing it across her little scarlet lips, and every time she did so she looked at me and laughed. She was evidently very puzzled to find that I had joss sticks burning in my room. She moved like a bird; she laughed like a child. She had gleaming white teeth, and that indescribable charm of person and manner which is the great birthright of every Japanese woman.

Japanese courtesy is infectious. When we were ready to go, I took up her little shoes and tried to put them on her. She snatched them from me with a pretty little cry of affected horror; she wiped my hands with her handkerchief. She laughed and bowed, and bowed and laughed, and said “Thank you, thank you.”

When she saw where the two gentlemen stood waiting for us she skimmed across the stage like a humming-bird. Seizing her husband by the arm, she spoke rapidly in Japanese. He translated, “My wife asks, have you any children?” When he told her, “Yes, I had two,” she made him tell me that she had two. And then she danced back to me and threw her arms about me, and laughed so softly. Bless it! What a womanly little person it was! We couldn’t speak together. Considering that we were both civilised, our methods of life could scarcely have been more different. But our babies had made us friends. We went to our ’rickshaws with her arm still about me; and I felt as if I were again a schoolgirl, whom some younger child had singled out and favoured with a caress.

It is pleasant to ride at midnight in a ’rickshaw through the streets of Yokohama. We seemed to be the only living things awake. We glided almost noiselessly along the silent streets. The naked feet of the coolies who drew our quaint two-wheeled carriages fell almost without a sound upon the soft roads. Whenever Mrs. Keutako’s ’rickshaw ran near mine, she waved her hand and laughed, and laughed and waved her hand.

Our hotel was run on European lines. It was very late, and I was unable to make any radical change in the menu of our supper. Mr. Keutako we found pleasant and intelligent. He was a prominent member of the Japanese Parliament. He was evidently familiar with all our viands, but our supper-table was palpably a mensa incognita to his pretty little wife. She watched her husband with shy slyness, and tried to do what he did; but I could see that she didn’t like our food. I managed to get a tin of salmon, for I knew that the Japanese are as invariably fond of fish as cats are. She ate the salmon readily enough, though it was new to her, and she nibbled a few vanilla wafers as she sipped her champagne, with which she seemed to have a dainty acquaintance. When we had left the table I asked her (through her husband) if the gentlemen might smoke. She nodded and laughed, and drew from her obi a microscopic silver pipe; she filled it with half a thimbleful of tobacco, mild as corn silk, which she carried in a silken pouch slung from her obi. She lit it, using a match with difficulty. She was accustomed to a small box filled with glowing coals. She handed her pipe to me; I found that one breath exhausted it. Among many other things typical of this interesting people, I afterwards learned that all Japanese women of fashion carry their pipe and pouch when they pay a visit. Their smoking together is an interchange of courtesy. The tobacco is almost tasteless, and one puff marks the length of the prescribed smoke. Our husbands talked, and, at her request, I showed her my baby clothes, and took her upstairs to see my sleeping children. When we came back to our sitting-room, she suggested, through her husband, that we should smoke cigarettes. I had been in the habit of smoking, semi-occasionally, one or two cigarettes in the strictest conjugal seclusion. I never had smoked before but one gentleman; but I thought the circumstances demanded any possible deviation from my usual customs. The gentlemen found a great deal to say to each other; while they talked we smoked. The next morning I had the almost unknown affliction of a headache. I learned from Mr. Keutako that his wife suffered sooner and less pleasantly. She had suggested, as I supposed, a Japanese custom. On her part, she thought that she was proposing a custom universal with European women. I have often wondered which of the ladies of the European Legations in Tokio was indirectly responsible for the maladresse from which we both suffered. I often reflect how much better it always is to be natural if one can do so without gaucherie.

A few days later we went to Tokio. I used often to wonder how it was that people were content to live and die in the gray Occident and never look upon the picture of the Orient. I never wondered more than when we were in Tokio. I know of no capital in Europe so comfortably and generously planned, except Vienna. The cities remind me of each other in many ways. The streets of both are broad and clean. Both are rich in parks, in drives, in trees, and in places of refreshment. Both are peopled by a pleasure-loving, pleasure-seeking race. Tokio is very beautiful, and it would be ungrateful of me not to mention that Tokio has one of the best hotels in the world.

The Imperial Palace is surrounded by three beautiful moats, all strictly guarded. It is impossible to look upon, much less to pass into, the holy of holies, the home of the Mikado, unless your presence is desired there. Even the members of the Legations know the palace very superficially, and enter even its outer rooms but rarely. I believe Madame Sannomiya to be the only European who has really seen the interior in anything like its entirety.

The architecture of Tokio varies from humble to elaborate; but it is all picturesque, and, in the heart of the city, all Japanese. Many of the nobles, who chiefly live in the suburbs, build very Western-looking houses. The width of the principal streets is almost unequalled. In the great parks blossoming vine strives with blossoming vine, and flowering tree crowds flowering tree. Amid them stand quaint statues of quaint gods, and carved and gilded figures. The distances in Tokio are immense; but I soon grew glad that it was so,—every inch of the long way was so thick with interest. The bazaars have not been robbed of their native colour by travelling multitudes of Europeans. Around Tokio are her hundred temples; many famous, all marvellous, and not to be indicated by a few hasty lines. The air blows softly through the carved portals, and gently sways the golden bells that hang from the jewelled ceiling; and that air is unpolluted by the breath of many Europeans.

We visited the Keutakos. The father dressed as a European. The mother, the children, and the servants wore the national costume. The customs of the house were Japanese; but I was surprised to find the rooms furnished in the European mode. There was a bust of Scott in the library, and an engraving of the Coliseum in the dining-room. When I coaxed Mrs. Keutako to take me upstairs I found everything different. She seemed afraid I would not like it; and I think she never believed that I thought it infinitely prettier than the reception rooms downstairs. But it was! The floors of the long, shady rooms were covered with cool, quaint mattings. One room pleased me particularly. A long, low screen stood near one end of the room; an inviting cushion was thrown near it. At the other end of the room was a tall blue vase, filled with chrysanthemums and fleur-de-lis. There were not a dozen articles in the room; but each thing in it was perfect. The Japanese always give a work of art the advantage of being framed in ample space. This is one reason why a Japanese interior is so effective; another reason is that they are very loath to give house-room to anything that is not a work of art.

Mrs. Keutako was always at ease. We spent long hours together alone. We could not speak to each other, but she never let it embarrass her or me. She let me amuse myself as freely as she had amused herself in my dressing-room. She understood how glad I was to quietly watch ordinary Japanese home-life. She had a hundred ways of entertaining me. Sometimes she would beckon me into the kitchen that I might see what was being cooked, and how. She sent for her hairdresser that I might see his wonderful methods. Sometimes she would steal behind me as I sat reading, and drop a rose on to my book. Sometimes it was her soft ball of a pet kitten; often it was her soft ball of a baby. One day she made her amah undress her, and dress her again, that I might see just what a Japanese woman wore, and how it was put on. She emptied her chests of clothing for my diversion. It was a wonderful collection. She was very fond of dress, and her husband delighted in gratifying her; besides, she had many garments that had been in her family for generations. She showed me her wedding-dress, she kept it in a sandal-wood box, and touched it reverently.

She was devoted to her two little girls. They were pretty, and oh, so quaint! They were well-behaved, but not painfully so. They climbed over their parents and begged for sweets for all the world like my bairns. The elder spoke a little English.

Their mother never was guilty of the stupidity of speaking to me in Japanese; but she would take a fantastic little instrument (I forget its name) and sing sweet, tinkling Japanese songs as she played upon it for me.

She had been brought up in luxury. She was the wife of a rich man. She had plenty of servants; still, she sewed a little, a very little. But she supervised her house perfectly; and she helped her husband a great deal in his political working. I have known her to copy notes for him, and write from his dictation, by the hour, when his secretary and he were over busy. And I know that he often consulted her about the turn of a sentence or a fact of history.

The last time I was in Tokio I was alone. I was there on business, and I was hurried. I only found time to call upon the Keutakos. She received me with the warm affection of an old friend and all the ceremony of Japanese etiquette. She gave me clear tea (no milk or sugar) in rare cups, without handles, and about the size of big thimbles. Then she gave me sweetmeats from a small lacquered chest of drawers. Each drawer contained a different kind of sweet; they were all made of sugar, tinted and shaped in imitation of some flower or leaf.

When I had to go she gave me a silver pipe she had bought for me. It was in a satin case, and the case matched a pouch which was filled with Japanese tobacco. A little white box held the whole. I made her write her name upon it, and mine. We often handle it, and speak of her and her husband, and I set great store by the excellent photographs she gave me of her two babies.

FOUR WOMEN THAT I KNEW IN TOKIO

The Countess Oyama^[1] and Mrs. Uriu

Stamatz Yamakawa was born very near the top of the Japanese social ladder. Shige Nagai came into the world a few rungs lower down.

Assimilation is the forte of the Japanese. They create nothing, but they improve everything they touch. Japan was once conquered by China. The Japanese retaliated by completely mastering every detail of Chinese art, and developing from it a Japanese art system, superior to anything the Chinese artists have ever been able to accomplish. Japan successfully invaded Korea. From the spoils of that war (and they were many) Japan learned to still more enrich her arts.

When Stamatz and Shige were babies, Japan had turned covetous eyes upon Europe and the United States. Not upon the territories of these countries, but upon their modes of life, their social customs, their thought-methods even. The Japanese are complacently conscious of having the most beautiful country upon earth, and they, the wisest of them at least, quite understand that they would cut a sorry figure in battle with a great Western Power. Japan never sought to conquer Western acres; but Japan longed to acquire everything that was good in Western thought and in Western methods of life. Things European became highly fashionable in Japan,—the fashion grew and grew. In ten years it was a rage. The Japanese Government encouraged boys and young men to visit Europe and America, and to there take University degrees as far as possible. The Japanese Government did more; they sent eight or ten (I think it was eight) girls to America to be educated. All of these girls were of gentle birth; several were noble. The youngest was seven years old, the eldest was twelve. The Japanese Minister at Washington, to whom they were sent in the first instance, was instructed to divide the little band into twos, and to place each pair into separate American homes,—of course, only in the homes of men and women of exceptional culture. Stamatz and Shige were received into the home of Dr. J. S. C. Abbott, the historian. He was a man of fine attainments, and the newcomers were initiated into a simple home-life of great refinement. Five and a half of the ten years they spent in America were spent in that New England home. They met there a considerable contingent of eminent Americans. Their home-sickness was mitigated by frequent visits from the Japanese students at Harvard. They saw the purest American form of good behaviour. They learned American literature with the rare advantage, or disadvantage, of intimacy with many of the men who were making American literature. They studied English literature under a man who reverenced it. They made delightful trips through the adjacent parts of America with the best companionship. After five years and a half they entered Vassar College at Poughkeepsie-on-the-Hudson. Stamatz Yamakawa entered the freshman class of 1882 with a high average. Shige Nagai was less capacitated to benefit by the prescribed College course than by a more elective system of education. She became an “Art Student,” and devoted herself to music. She was obliged by the College regulations to pursue the lighter of the studies embraced in the ordinary College curriculum.

DANJERO IN HIS FAVOURITE RÔLE. DANJERO IN EUROPEAN COSTUME. DANJERO AS I KNEW HIM.         P. 253.

In the fall of 1879—when they had been there a year—I went to Vassar. A daughter-in-law of Dr. Abbott’s was one of my dearest friends; that gave me an added interest in my two Japanese college-mates, and it secured me their immediate acquaintance. It was easy to know Shige. Stamatz was exclusive; she was very brilliant. Shige was very sweet. They both wore European dress. Stamatz looked like a very beautiful Jewess of a poetic type; Shige was broadly and indubitably Japanese. Stamatz was president of her class in her Sophomore year. She was a member of the “Shakespeare”—a club always confined to the girls who were easily first intellectually. She took high honours in English literature. She wrote charming essays. And I noticed, when I saw her in Tokio, ten years later, the beautiful purity of her English. She spoke, as she always had spoken, with a slight accent; but her vocabulary and her use of it were flawless. Shige was never president of anything; but every one loved her. She was invaluable at our fortnightly “candy pulls.” She was splendid on a sleigh ride, or when we went “coasting.” She spent half her leisure in the infirmary, coddling the sick girls. She got through her examinations with eminent respectability. She wrote stiff, correct English. She spoke very broken English, and, when I saw her in Tokio, her vocabulary had shrunk to meagre dimensions; and she used it with a fine disregard of narrow propriety. But I have no memory of an hour’s indisposition at Vassar that I did not hear the click, click of Shige’s funny little walk, as she came down the corridor bringing me a pitcher of lemonade and unlimited sympathy. I don’t remember a headache there that her little fingers didn’t soothe away. Strangely enough when she wrote to me, after I had left Tokio for Yokohama, I saw that she wrote English quite as well as she did when we were in Poughkeepsie. I never saw Stamatz excited, though two red spots always flamed on her face the days when the Japanese mails were due; and I have seen her hand shake as she thrust it through the window of our college post-office and asked for letters. I have never seen Shige when she wasn’t excited. Stamatz was very beautiful from every standpoint; she was slim and tall for a Japanese woman. Shige was plain; she was dumpy and very near-sighted. She had a wee, broad nose. Stamatz was always self-possessed. Shige was easily flurried. Stamatz played a wonderful game of chess, and excelled every professor in the faculty at whist. Shige was immense at blind-man’s-buff, and could dance a supremely ridiculous version of the Highland-fling. Once a day they secluded themselves in their “parlour” and spoke Japanese for an hour. Stamatz was fanatic in her observance of this, and compelled Shige to be as regular. Stamatz wrote a letter “home” every day. Shige had all a schoolgirl’s horror of letter-writing. They spent four years at Vassar. Then, after a six months’ tour of America, they returned to Japan.

When we were in Colombo I learned from some Japanese naval officers that Stamatz Yamakawa had made a brilliant marriage. She had married the Minister of War, Count Oyama, an elderly man of high position, great power, and immense wealth.

As we neared Japan we heard the name Oyama more and more often. The Count is very popular. He is a courteous gentleman, and is at the head of Masonry in Japan. The Countess has become a noted hostess. She speaks French and English fluently; unless I mistake, she speaks German and Italian well. She is an excellent Latin scholar. I found her very changed—the flower of her beauty was dead. The girl had been anxious to maintain for Japan a high intellectual standard in our little college world; the woman seemed to be half asleep. She had shed her Occidentalisms as she had shed her Western habiliments. She had sunk back into the drowsy ease of Oriental existence. She was four times a mother, and she had four step-children.

Long before we could see the house we knew that our ’rickshaws had crossed the boundaries of Count Oyama’s Tokio dominions; for everywhere were outdoor servants. Some were binding up the gigantic rose trees. Some were training great ropes of violet-flowered wistaria around the tree trunks. Some were leisurely rolling the velvet lawn. All bore upon the backs of their kimonos a large Japanese coat-of-arms or crest—the arms of the ancient house of Oyama. In Japan the members of a noble family have a small reproduction of the crest woven in or embroidered on their garments. On the clothes of their servants it appears very much larger. On the robes of the head of the house it is about the size of a sixpence. On the back of a coolie the emblazonment is the size of a generous dinner plate. Count Oyama’s extensive grounds were beautifully cared for. The house, which was large and plain, and of Western architecture, was built of red brick. It was partly covered with vines. The interior was beautifully furnished in the best European style. A few very rare and beautiful Japanese things were scattered about each room; but I know a dozen London houses where things Japanese are more en Évidence,—though certainly not things of such value and interest.

The Countess received me with all her old grace and graciousness. She gave us tea and spongecake. The tea service was old English silver. Her face lit up a little when she told me how she should enjoy showing me Tokio; but it grew listless when I mentioned Vassar. It was evident to me that she had spent ten years in exile, because the Mikado had thought it best. Her exile was over, and she had little pleasure in recalling it. She spoke as entertainingly as ever of the books she had read in America; but I could not learn that she had read one printed page of French or English since her return to Japan. I spoke of The Miscellany, a little college monthly in which she had been greatly interested, and for which she sometimes wrote. She said, she believed they sometimes sent her a copy, but she wasn’t sure.

She was dressed quietly, and with but two traces of her Western residence. She wore bronze slippers of Parisian make; and her very beautiful hair was worn in the prettiest and simplest of Greek fashions.

A noted European called upon the Countess Oyama; he was accompanied by a Japanese gentleman. When Stamatz entered the room her countryman bent seven times to the floor. “Countess!” exclaimed the stranger, holding out his hand, “if I bow as often and as low as that, I shall fall down. But I am extremely glad to meet you.” She smiled, and made his call very delightful; but she never forgave him. Stamatz Yamakawa was born in the purple, and she loves it.

The Countess Oyama was easily found. I hunted three days for Mrs. Uriu; and then I only found her because it occurred to my husband to ride out to Count Oyama’s and ask for Shige’s address.

The little woman’s house was a two hours’ ’rickshaw ride from the Imperial Hotel; and in Tokio there are two coolies to each ’rickshaw, and they run very rapidly. When we left the hotel we skirted the outer moat of the palace. Then we flew through miles of streets, each more interesting than the others. All were lined with booths. We had a dissolving view of quaint bronze lamps, rich ivories, unique wood carvings, and a thousand other temptations. Is it not Sir Edwin Arnold who says that, when he was in Tokio, he was tempted to sell his boots that he might buy one more curio? I did sell all my husband’s old clothes one day. He seemed to feel that I had been indiscreet. And I have a very choice bit of Satsuma at which he always looks with a very queer smile. I received a “collect” parcel from Yokohama a few weeks ago; when the housemaid brought it in, my husband went into the hall, and brought me in his overcoat, his best umbrella, and his crush hat. But “he laughs best who laughs last,”—I made him pay for that parcel.

On the coolies ran. We passed the big, bare theatre where Danjero plays—Danjero, whom we were afterwards to meet, and also to see in one of Japan’s classic dramas. Next we crossed one of the great parks; and then we began twisting in and out of innumerable tortuous lanes. They found the house at last; but I don’t know how they did it.

We went up a funny little path, and knocked at a funny little door. It was a minute house, purely Japanese. The door slid back. The little fat servant fell on her nose at our feet, and cried out some words of ceremonial greeting. We couldn’t make her understand what we wanted. We couldn’t make her get up. I tried to give her our cards: I might as well have offered her an infernal machine. Her mistress heard our voices and came out. The jolly little woman was not changed a bit. She seized me by one hand and my husband by the other. She had never seen or heard of him,—she hadn’t seen me for ten years,—but she instinctively knew who he must be and adopted him with her funny little motherly way.

She had forgotten most of her imperfect English, and, just at first, we could barely understand each other; and then, somehow, the ten years seemed but as a day. She overwhelmed me with questions about every one we had known in our schooldays; but not until she had made us very welcome, and given us tea. She clapped her hands three times, and the tea came in. In reality, the servant brought it in; but she came on her hands and knees, and the tea-tray was far more conspicuous than she. Shige sent for her five little children; they bobbed us queer little curtsies, with their queer little bodies, and laughed and ran out.

The only hint of Europe I saw in Mrs. Uriu’s little home were three old books and a box of cigars, which she brought out for my husband, with a gleeful laugh.

She was so sorry her husband was away with his ship, he was so nice. He was a lieutenant in the navy. She was teaching music; the Empress had founded a girls’ college, and she, Shige, was professor of the piano.