hat
every movement involved the organization of a veritable caravan of
ponies, mules, carts, men on foot, and sedan chairs carried by coolies.
These chairs were for the Director and his wife, who, however, would not
use them, preferring saddle horses. But the proud manager of the
expedition insisted that they be carried along, empty, to show the
admiring populace that even if the strange foreign potentates amazingly
preferred to ride in a rather common way on horseback they could at
least afford to have sedan chairs. Imagine a prospecting outfit in the
California Sierra or the West Australian bush with sedan chairs! And
there were cooks and valets and cot beds and folding chairs and mosquito
bed curtains and charcoal stoves and an array of pans and pots like
Oscar's in the Waldorf kitchens, and often a cavalry guard of
twenty-five or fifty men, superfluous but insistent and always hungry.
Whether the expedition found any mines or not it was at least an
impressive object lesson to the Celestial myriads that the new Imperial
Department of Mines knew how to hunt for them in proper style. When Mrs.
Hoover once remonstrated with one of the interpreters of the cavalcade
about such an unnecessary outfit, the answer was: "Mr. Hoover is such
expensive man to my country we cannot afford to let him die for want of
small things."

A similar state had to be lived up to in the Director's home in
Tientsin. The house was a large, four-square, wide-veranded affair, in
which a dozen to fifteen servants, carefully distinguished as "No. 1
Boy," "No. 2 Boy" and so on down the line, waited, according to their
own immemorial traditions, on the Director and his wife. These servants
had curious ways, and a curious language in the odd pidgin English that
enabled the door boy to announce that "the number one topside foreign
devil joss man have makee come," when the English Bishop called, and the
table boy to announce a dish of duckling as "one piecee duck pups," or
of chicken as "one piecee looster." The social scale among the few
foreign residents was very precisely defined, and the social life of the
foreign colony highly conventionalized, so that the unassuming,
practical-minded young engineer of the high title and social position
who was terribly bored--as he is today--by social rigmarole, and who was
thought rather queer by the conventional-minded small diplomats and
miscellaneous foreign residents because, as one of them put it, "he
always