ubjects it was partly better informed than I; on others it displayed
the infinite credulity of a two-year-old. But the wearied eyes were ever
the same. They will be the same when it is fifty. I was more sorry for
it than I could say. All its reminiscences had got jumbled, and
incidents of Spain were baled into Turkey and India. Some day a
schoolmaster will get hold of it and try to educate it, and I should
dearly like to see at which end he will begin. The head is too full
already and the--the other part does not exist. Albert is, I presume,
but an ordinary American child. He was to me a revelation. Now I want to
see a little American girl--but not now--not just now. My nerves are
shattered by the Jews and Albert; and unless they recover their tone I
shall turn back at Yokohama.

No. VII

SHOWS HOW I ARRIVED IN CHINA AND SAW ENTIRELY THROUGH THE GREAT WALL AND
OUT UPON THE OTHER SIDE.

"Where naked ignorance
Delivers brawling judgments all day long
On all things unashamed."

The past few days on the _Nawab_ have been spent amid a new people and a
very strange one. There were speculators from South Africa: financiers
from home (these never talked in anything under hundreds of thousands of
pounds and, I fear, bluffed awfully); there were Consuls of far-off
China ports and partners of China shipping houses talking a talk and
thinking thoughts as different from Ours as is Our slang from the slang
of London. But it would not interest you to learn the story of our
shipload--to hear about the hard-headed Scotch merchant with a taste for
spiritualism, who begged me to tell him whether there was really
anything in Theosophy and whether Tibet was full of levitating _chelas_,
as he believed; or of the little London curate out for a holiday who had
seen India and had faith in the progress of missionary work there--who
believed that the C. M. S. was shaking the thoughts and convictions of
the masses, and that the Word of the Lord would ere long prevail above
all other councils. He in the night-watches tackled and disposed of the
great mysteries of Life and Death, and was looking forward to a lifetime
of toil amid a parish without a single rich man in it.

When you are in the China Seas be careful to keep all your flannel-wear
to hand. In an hour the steamer swung from tropical heat (including
prickly) to a cold raw fog, as wet as a Scotch mist. Morning gave us a
new world--somewhere betwee