d almost beyond recognition.

Moreover, the high buildings you once knew have all disappeared, and a
wilderness chiefly of tiny one and two story houses has taken their
places, wherein the first story, even in two-story buildings, is so
low that all your new brown friends warn you by a gesture to duck your
head as you go through the doors, while the second story is usually
little more than a garret.

Next, a wild jargon of unmeaning voices strikes your ear and you
discover that ninety-nine people out of a hundred have forgotten how
to speak English. More than this, the English signs are no more, and
on the billboards and before the business offices are marks that look
as if a thousand ostriches fresh from a thousand ink barrels had been
set to scratching new signs to take the places of the old. You pick up
a book {10} or the morning paper, and the same thing has happened--pig
tracks, chicken tracks, and double bowknots fantastically tied instead
of English type--and everybody begins at the back of the book and
reads toward him instead of reading the way you have grown used to!

And the buggies, carriages, and automobiles: what on earth has become
of them? There's hardly a horse in sight, but dozens or scores of men
with bare legs and odd clothes, each flying around pulling a light
two-wheeled jinrikisha, a man or a woman seated in each man-drawn
"buggy"; and there are dozens of other bare-legged men laboriously
pulling heavy loads of vegetables, freight, and even lumber and giant
telegraph poles! You jump into one of the rickshaws and forget your
strange little Puck-like steed in the marvel of your surroundings till
a voice from the shafts makes you feel like Balaam when the ass spoke
to him!

By this time you begin to get a hazy idea as to how the people are
dressed, and as nearly as you can make out, it is something like this:

Evidently all the inhabitants of an ancient Roman city, a modern
American town, a half-dozen Hindoo villages, and several thousand
seashore bathers have all thrown their clothes--(or the lack of
them!)--into one tremendous pile, and everybody has rushed in
pell-mell and put on the first thing, or the first two or three
things, that came to hand. There is every conceivable type of
clothing, but perhaps the larger number have wound up with something
like a light bathing suit and a sort of gingham dressing-gown belted
over it; and if one has less than this, why, then, as the Japanese
say, "_