deaf ear to my men's entreaties for shelter. For very
helplessness I laughed aloud. I screamed with laughter, and the folk
gathered to see me almost in hysterics. They soon began to smile, then
to laugh, and seeing the effect, I laughed still louder, and soon had
the whole village with tears of laughter making furrows down their
unwashed faces, laughing as a pack of hyenas. At last a kind old woman
gave way to my boy's persuasions, beckoning us to follow her into a
house. Here we found a young girl of about nine summers in charge. It
was all rare fun. There was nothing to eat, and so the men went one here
and another there buying supplies for the night. Another cleared out
the room, and made it a little habitable. The bull-dog coolie cooked the
rice, Shanks boiled eggs and cut up the pork into small slices, another
fed the pony, and then we fed ourselves.

In the evening a wood fire was kindled in the corner near my bed, and we
all sat round on the mud floor--stools there were none--to tell yarns.
My confederates were out for a spree. We smoked and drank tea and
yarned. Suddenly a stick would be thrust over my shoulder to the fire:
it was merely a man's pipe going to the fire for a light. Chinese never
use matches; it is a waste when there are so many fires about. If on the
road a man wants to light his pipe, he walks into a home and gets it
from the fire. No one minds. No notice is taken of the intrusion.
Everybody is polite, and the man may not utter a word. At a wayside
food-shop a man may go behind to where the cooking is being conducted,
poke his pipe into the embers, and walk out pulling at it, all as
naturally as if that man were in his own house. An Englishman would have
a rough time of it if he had to go down on his hands and knees and pull
away at a pipe from a fire on the floor.

No father, no mother, no elder brother had the little girl in charge.
She was left without friends entirely, and a man must have been a hard
man indeed were he to steel his heart against such a helpless little
one. I called her to me, gave her a little present, and comforted her as
she cried for the very knowledge that an Englishman would do a kind act
to a little waif such as herself. She was in the act of giving back the
money to me, when Lao Chang, with pleasant aptitude, interposed,
explained that foreigners occasionally develop generous moods, and that
she had better stop crying and lock the money away. She did this, but
the po