that time were chiefly gambling, for the Chinese
theatre wherein the latter produced his plays (which lasted for several
months and comprised the events of a whole dynasty) was not yet built.
But he had one or two companies of jugglers who occasionally performed
also at American theatres. I remember a singular incident which attended
the debut of a newly arrived company. It seemed that the company had
been taken on their Chinese reputation solely, and there had been no
previous rehearsal before the American stage manager. The theatre was
filled with an audience of decorous and respectable San Franciscans of
both sexes. It was suddenly emptied in the middle of the performance;
the curtain came down with an alarmed and blushing manager apologizing
to deserted benches, and the show abruptly terminated. Exactly WHAT
had happened never appeared in the public papers, nor in the published
apology of the manager. It afforded a few days' mirth for wicked San
Francisco, and it was epigrammatically summed up in the remark that "no
woman could be found in San Francisco who was at that performance, and
no man who was not." Yet it was alleged even by John's worst detractors
that he was innocent of any intended offense. Equally innocent, but
perhaps more morally instructive, was an incident that brought his
career as a singularly successful physician to a disastrous close.
An ordinary native Chinese doctor, practicing entirely among his own
countrymen, was reputed to have made extraordinary cures with two
or three American patients. With no other advertising than this, and
apparently no other inducement offered to the public than what their
curiosity suggested, he was presently besieged by hopeful and eager
sufferers. Hundreds of patients were turned away from his crowded doors.
Two interpreters sat, day and night, translating the ills of ailing
San Francisco to this medical oracle, and dispensing his
prescriptions--usually small powders--in exchange for current coin. In
vain the regular practitioners pointed out that the Chinese possessed
no superior medical knowledge, and that their religion, which proscribed
dissection and autopsies, naturally limited their understanding of the
body into which they put their drugs. Finally they prevailed upon an
eminent Chinese authority to give them a list of the remedies generally
used in the Chinese pharmacopoeia, and this was privately circulated.
For obvious reasons I may not repeat it here. But