The proprietor of the inn in which I stayed was a man of about fifty, of goodly person and somewhat corpulent, comely presence, good humor, and privileged freedom.  He had a pretty daughter.  He was an exception to the ordinary father in China, in the fact that he was proud of her, as he was of his house and his faring.  But in all conscience he should have been abundantly ashamed of his charges, for my boy said I was charged three times too much, and I have no cause for doubting his word either, for he was fairly honest.  I once had a boy in Singapore who acted for three weeks as a “ganti"[AK] whilst my own boy underwent a surgical operation, and between misreckonings, miscarriages, misdealings, mistakes and misdemeanors, had he remained with me another month I should have had to pack up lock, stock and barrel and clear.

I stayed here a day in the hope of getting my mail, but had the pleasure of seeing only the bag containing it.  It was sealed, and the postmaster had no authority to break that seal.

There were no telegraph poles in the district through which I was passing; the connections were affixed to the trunks of trees.  The telegraph runs right across the Ch’u-hsiong-fu plain, on entering which one crosses a rustic bridge just below a rather fine pagoda, from which an excellent view is obtained of the old city.  The wall up towards the north gate, where there is another pagoda, is built over a high knoll.  Inside the wall half the town is uncultivated ground.  Four youngsters here were having a great time on the back of a lazy buffalo, who, turning his head swiftly to get rid of some irritating bee, dislodged the quartet to the ground, where they fought and cursed each other over the business.

Everything that one sees around here is particularly “Chinesey.”  It may be supposed that I am not the first person who has gone through town after town and found in all that he looks at, particularly the houses, certain forms identical, inevitable, exasperating by common repetition.  It has been said that poetry is not in things, it is in us; but in China very little poetry comes into the homes and lives of the common millions:  they are all dead dwelling-houses, even the best, bare homes without life or brightness.  Among the working-classes of the West there is to be found a kind of ministering beauty which makes its way everywhere, springing from the hands of woman.  When the dwelling is cramped, the purse limited, the table modest, a woman who has the gift finds a way to make order and puts care and art into everything in her house, puts a soul into the inanimate, and gives those subtle and winsome touches to which the most brutish of human beings is sensible.  But in China woman does nothing of this.  Her life is unaesthetic to the last degree.  No happy improvisations or touches of the stamp of personality enter her home; one cannot trace the touches of witchery in the tying of a ribbon.  Everywhere you find the same class