now
is being subjected to slow change. The original stock, however, takes on
no change whatever, and several generations must pass before this
transfer of mental vision can be effected, when the Chinese will view
all things and all peoples in their true light.

Next morning my three men were heavy. The lean fellow--I have christened
him Shanks, a long, shambling human bag of bones--moved about painfully
in a listless sort of way, betokening severe rheumatics; his joints
needed oil. Four or five huge basins of steaming rice and the customary
amount of reboiled cabbage, however, bucked him up a bit, and holding up
a crooked, bony finger, he indicated intelligently that we had one
hundred li to cover. Whilst engaged in conversation thus, sounds of
early morning revelry reached me from below. My boy, his accustomed
serenity now quite disturbed, held threateningly above the head of the
yamen runner (who had given me a profound kotow the evening previous
prior to taking on his duties) a length of three-inch sugar cane; he
evidently meant to flatten him out. This I learned was because this
shadower of the august presence wished to take Yang-lin (about 60 li
away) instead of going to Ch'ang-p'o (100 li) as I intended. I got him
in, looked him as squarely in the face as it is possible when a Chinese
wants to evade your scrutiny, told him I wished to go to Ch'ang-p'o, and
that I hoped I should have the pleasure of his company thus far. He
replied with a grinning smile, which one could easily have taken for a
smiling grin--

"Oh, yes, foreign mandarin, Ch'ang-p'o--100 li--foreign mandarin,
foreign mandarin."

And I thought the incident closed. Such is the appalling gullibility of
the Englishman in China.

We stopped for tea at a small hamlet ten li out. The place was deserted
save for a small starving boy, whose chief attention was given to
laborious endeavors to make his clothing meet in certain necessary
areas. He evidently had never seen a foreigner. As he directed his
optics towards me he winced visibly. He walked round me several times,
fell over a grimy pail of soap-suds, stopped, gazed in enraptured
enchantment with parted lips and outstretched arms as if he had begun to
suspect what it was before him. To the eye of the beholder, however, he
gazed as yet only on vacancy, but just as I was about to attempt
self-explanation he was gone, tearing away down the hill as fast as his
legs could carry him, the ragged remains o