any dollars
are demanded of the foreigner. My boy stands by, however, magnificently
proud of his lucrative and important post, yelling precautions to the
curious populace to stand away. He hints, he does not declare outright,
but by ungentle innuendo allows them to understand that, whatever their
private characters may be, to him they are all liars and rogues and
thieves. It is all so funny, that one's fatigue is minimized to the last
degree by the humor one gets and the novel changes one meets everywhere.

Onward again, my men singing, perhaps quarreling, always swearing. Their
language is low and coarse and vulgar, but happily ignorant am I.

The country, too, is fascinating in the extreme. A man must not come to
China for pleasure unless he love his mistress Nature when she is most
rudely clad. Some of her lovers are fascinated most in by-places, in the
cool of forests, on the summit of lofty mountains, high up from the
mundane, in the cleft of canons, everywhere that the careless lover is
not admitted to her contemplation. It is for such that China holds out
an inviting hand, but she offers little else to the Westerner--the
student of Nature and of man can alone be happy in the interior.
Forgetting time and the life of my own world, I sometimes come to
inviolate stillnesses, where Nature opens her arms and bewitchingly
promises embraces in soft, unending, undulating vastnesses, where even
the watching of a bird building its nest or brooding over its young, or
some little groundling at its gracious play, seems to hold one charmed
beyond description. It is, some may say, a nomadic life. Yes, it is a
nomadic life. But how beautiful to those of us, and there are many, who
love less the man-made comforts of our own small life than the
entrancing wonders of the God-made world in spots where nothing has
changed. Gladly did I quit the dust and din of Western life, the
artificialities of dress, and the unnumbered futile affectations of our
own maybe not misnamed civilization, to go and breathe freely and
peacefully in those far-off nooks of the silent mountain-tops where
solitude was broken only by the lulling or the roaring of the winds of
heaven. Thank God there are these uninvaded corners. The realm of
silence is, after all, vaster than the realm of noise, and the fact
brought a consolation, as one watched Nature effecting a sort of
coquetry in masking her operations.

And as I look upon it all I wonder--wonder whether