e cynical rabble poured in
behind. The pole-chair caravan resumed its journey.

The girl wished that she had come afoot, despite the knowledge that
she would have suffered many inconveniences, accidental and
intentional jostling, insolence and ribald jest. The Cantonese,
excepting in the shops where he expects profit, always resents the
intrusion of the _fan-quei_--foreign devil. The chair was torture.
It hung from the centre of a stout pole, each end of which rested
upon the calloused shoulder of a coolie; an ordinary Occidental
chair with a foot-rest. The coolies proceeded at a swinging,
mincing trot, which gave to the suspended seat a dancing action
similar to that of a suddenly agitated hanging-spring of a
birdcage. It was impossible to meet the motion bodily.

Her shoulders began to ache. Her head felt absurdly like one of
those noddling manikins in the Hong-Kong curio-shops. Jiggle-joggle,
jiggle-joggle...! For each pause she was grateful. Whenever Ah Cum
(whose normal stride was sufficient to keep him at the side of her
chair) pointed out something of interest, she had to strain the
cords in her neck to focus her glance upon the object. Supposing the
wire should break and her head tumble off her shoulders into the
street? The whimsey caused another smile to ripple across her lips.

This amazing world she had set forth to discover! Yesterday at this
time she had had no thought in her head about Canton. America, the
land of rosy apples and snowstorms, beckoned, and she wanted to fly
thitherward. Yet, here she was, in the ancient Chinese city,
weaving in and out of the narrow streets some scarcely wide enough
for two men to walk abreast, streets that boiled and eddied with
yellow human beings, who worshipped strange gods, ate strange
foods, and diffused strange suffocating smells. These were less
like streets than labyrinths, hewn through an eternal twilight. It
was only when they came into a square that daylight had a positive
quality.

So many things she saw that her interest stumbled rather than
leaped from object to object. Rows of roasted duck, brilliantly
varnished; luscious vegetables, which she had been warned against;
baskets of melon seed and water-chestnuts; men working in teak and
blackwood; fan makers and jade cutters; eggs preserved in what
appeared to her as petrified muck; bird's nests and shark fins. She
glimpsed Chinese penury when she entered a square given over to the
fishmongers. Carp, ten