i? Were they, in that
isle so distant from Paris, their capital, practising a puritanism
unknown at home? Was nature so fearful? The figure of the barefooted
man often arose as I watched the Farallones disappear, the last of
land we would see until we arrived at Tahiti, nearly two weeks later.

The days fell away from the calendar; they obliterated themselves
as quietly as our ship's wake to the north, as we planed over the
smooth waters toward the equator. Gradually the passengers took on
character, and out of the first welter of contacts came those definite
impressions which are almost always right and which, though we modify
them or reverse them by acquaintance, we return to finally.

There was a Chinese, the strangest figure of an Asiatic, with a thin
mustache, and wearing always a black frock-coat and trousers, elastic
gaiters, and a stiff, black hat. His face was long and oval and the
color of old ivory. He had tried to gain admission to Australia and New
Zealand, and then the United States, and had been excluded under some
harsh laws. He was plainly a scholar, but had brought with him from
China a store of curios, probably to enable him to earn money in the
land of the white. Australia had refused him; he had been shut out of
San Francisco, and the very steamship that brought him was compelled
to take him away. He had failed to bring a necessary certificate,
or something of the sort, and the inexorable laws of three Christian
countries had sent him wandering, so that it was inevitable he must
return to China by the route he had come. He was the most mournful of
sights, sitting most of the day in a retired spot, brooding, apparently
over his fate. He never smiled, though I who have been much in China,
tried to stir him from his sadness by exclamations and gestures. His
race has a very keen sense of humor. They see a thousand funny things
about them, and laugh inwardly; but they never see anything amusing
in themselves. The individual man conceives himself a dignified figure
in a world of burlesque.

This man's face was rid of any self-pity. I think he was stunned by
the horror of the thing, that he, a man of Chinese letters, who had
departed from the centuried custom of his pundit caste of remaining
in their own country, who had left his family or clan to increase
his store of lesser knowledge, should be denied the door by these
inferior nations of the West. He might have recalled Chien Lung, a
Manchu emperor,