place at which you
find me is Hankow, on the great Yang Tsze Kiang, or river, some six
hundred miles from its mouth. If you have a map of China, and will find
on it the Yang Tsze, by tracing with your finger--if your map is at all
correct--you will discover the cities of Chin Kiang, Nanking, Nganking,
Kiu Kiang, and finally, at the junction of the river Han with the Yang
Tsze, Wuchang. Hankow will probably not be on your map, but on the
north bank of the Yang Tsze, just at the point of junction with the
Han, is this important trading port, thrown open to foreigners in 1861,
after the signing of the treaty of Tein-Tsin.

And now for Charley, whom I have kept talking pigeon-English to Akong
all this time. Charley was the son of an old friend, chaplain to the
British consulate at one of the coast ports; his mother dying, Charley
was to have been sent home to relatives in England, but I had prevailed
upon his father to let the boy, now between twelve and fourteen years
old, make me a visit before his final departure.

And now for the conspiracy:

"Chin-chin (how do you do), Akong?" said I.

"What is it, Charley? Out with it, my boy; some mischief, I know."
Akong gave a chuckle and a muttered "hi-yah," and Charley proceeded to
explain.

"Well Cha,"--the Chinamen called me Cha-tsze and the boy had
abbreviated it to Cha,--"Akong says that he has a boat going up to the
tea country to-morrow or next day, and wants me to go with him; may I?"

[Illustration: THE BARBER.]

Charley knew that I could refuse him nothing, but the trip of several
hundred miles into a district rarely, if ever, visited by foreigners,
involved more of a risk than I cared to assume. Charley seeing that I
looked unusually solemn, turned to Akong for support.

"What for you no go too, Cha-tsze? Just now my thinkee no got new chop
come inside two week; get back plenty time."

Akong's pigeon-English perhaps requires explanation: You must know,
then, that the Chinese with whom all foreigners transact business,
instead of learning correct English have a lingo, or _patois_, of their
own, ascribed, but I think erroneously, to the carelessness of their
first English visitors, who addressed them in this manner, thinking to
make themselves more easily understood. The fact is, that
pigeon-English, besides having many Portuguese words mixed up with
it,--the Portuguese, you know, were established in China as early as
the seventeenth century,--is in many instan