haws. Hong-Kong has killed the romance of the
'rickshaw in my mind. They ought to be sacred to pretty ladies, instead
of which men go to office in them, officers in full canonicals use them;
tars try to squeeze in two abreast, and from what I have heard down at
the barracks they do occasionally bring to the guard-room the drunken
defaulter. "He falls asleep inside of it, Sir, and saves trouble." The
Chinese naturally have the town for their own, and profit by all our
building improvements and regulations. Their golden and red signs flame
down the Queen's Road, but they are careful to supplement their own
tongue by well-executed Europe lettering. I found only one exception,
thus:--

Fussing, Garpenter
And Gabinet Naktr
Has good Gabi
Nets tor Sale.

The shops are made to catch the sailor and the curio hunter, and they
succeed admirably. When you come to these parts put all your money in a
bank and tell the manager man not to give it you, however much you ask.
So shall you be saved from bankruptcy.

The Professor and I made a pilgrimage from Kee Sing even unto Yi King,
who sells the decomposed fowl, and each shop was good. Though it sold
shoes or sucking pigs, there was some delicacy of carving or gilded
tracery in front to hold the eye, and each thing was quaint and striking
of its kind. A fragment of twisted roots helped by a few strokes into
the likeness of huddled devils, a running knop and flower cornice, a
dull red and gold half-door, a split bamboo screen--they were all good,
and their joinings and splicings and mortisings were accurate. The
baskets of the coolies were good in shape, and the rattan fastenings
that clenched them to the polished bamboo yoke were whipped down, so
that there were no loose ends. You could slide in and out the drawers in
the slung chests of the man who sold dinners to the 'rickshaw coolies;
and the pistons of the little wooden hand-pumps in the shops worked
accurately in their sockets.

I was studying these things while the Professor was roaming through
carved ivories, broidered silks, panels of inlay, tortoise-shell
filigree, jade-tipped pipes, and the God of Art only knows what else.

"I don't think even as much of him (meaning our Indian craftsman) as I
used to do," said the Professor, taking up a tiny ivory grotesque of a
small baby trying to pull a water-buffalo out of its wallow--the whole
story of beast and baby written in the hard ivory. The same