t I could
write, sleep, eat, drink, and be merry, and go through personal and
private routine with no embarrassment. If I turned for the purpose, I
could easily stare out of face a member of the crowd whose inquisitive
propensities had become annoying, but as soon as he left another filled
the gap. Quite pitiful was it to see how trivial articles of foreign
manufacture--such, for instance, as the cover of an ordinary tin or the
fabric of one's clothing--brought a regular deluge of childish interest
and inane questioning; and if I happened to make a few shorthand notes
upon anything making a particular impression, a look half surprised,
half amused, went from one to another like an electric current. Had I
been scheming out celestial hieroglyphics their mouths could not have
opened wider. As I write now I am asked by a respectable person how many
ounces of silver a Johann Faber's B.B. costs. I have told him, and he
has retired smiling, evidently thinking that I am romancing.

That I impress the crowd everywhere is evident. But with all their
questioning, they are rarely rude; their stare is simply the stare of
little children seeing a thing for the first time in their lives. It is
all so hard to understand. My silver and my gold they solicit not; they
merely desire to see me and to feel me. A certain faction of the crowd,
however, do solicit my silver.

Lao Chang has been buying vegetables, and has brought all the vegetable
gardeners and greengrocers around me. The poultry rearers are here too,
and the forage dealers and the grass cutters and the basket makers, and
other thrifty members of the commercial order of Ch'u-tung humankind.
When I came away the people dropped into line and strained their necks
to get a parting smile. I was sped on my way with a public curiosity as
if I were a penal servitor released from prison, a general home from a
war, or something of that kind. And so this wonderful wonder of wonders
was glad when he emerged from the labyrinthic, brain-confusing
bewilderment of Chinese interior life of this town into somewhat clearer
regions. I could not understand. And to the wisest man, wide as may be
his vision, the Chinese mind and character remain of a depth as infinite
as is its possibility of expansion. The volume of Chinese nature is one
of which as yet but the alphabet is known to us.

My own men had got quite used to me, and their minds were directed more
to working than to wondering. In China, a