d persist in the belief that it was an impossibility for me to tell
the truth. Later, pointing at me and eyeing me up and down as I shaved
in the twilight, he sneered, "Engleeshman! Engleeshman!" and scooting
with an armful of clothing, small pots of eatables, official documents
and other sundries, told me point-blank that he did not believe that
such a noble person could not speak such a contemptible language as
Chinese.

Seeing no official, then, I presumed I was their man. Whilst I fed
slowly on my rice and cabbage in a small earth-floor room, with my nose
as near as convenient to my oil lamp to get a little warmth, the
discomfort of Chinese life was forced upon me, and I imagined I was
having a good time. I was the best off in the inn by far; the others
must have been colder, certainly had worse food to eat, and yet to me it
was all the height of utmost cheerlessness.

From a hamlet opposite the town, where I sat down by the fire
exhausted in an old woman's shaky dwelling, and fed on aged
sardines and hot rice (atrocious mixture), there is a plain extending
for twenty li to Yuen-nan-i--flat as country in the Fen district. The
road was good (in wet weather, however, it must be terrible), and I
would drive a motor-car across, were it not for the 15-in. ruts which
disfigure the surface. And I know a man who would do this even, despite
the ruts: he takes a delight in running over dogs and small boys,
damaging rickshaws, bumping into bullock-carts, and so on--he would
have done it with liveliest freedom.

But what poverty there was! What women! What Children! With barely an
exception, the women had faces ground by want and bare necessity, in
which every cheerful and sympathetic lineament had been effaced by
life-long slavery and misery. In the bitter cold they, women and
children, crouched round a scanty fir-wood firing, not enough even to
keep alive their natural heat. One long pitiful sight of thriftless
poverty.

To Hungay was a fearful day. Little to eat could I procure, and the cold
gave me a lusty ox's appetite. To me a bellyful came as a windfall.

At last we sat down by the roadside at one small table, hearing the test
of age, rickety and worm-eaten. We gathered like hogs at their troughs,
with the household hog scratching at our feet. I grew impatient and
querulous over constant culinary disappointment. I longed not for the
heaped-up board of the pampered and luxurious, I wanted food. Indigent
man was I, w