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, whose dietetical elegancies had been forgotten, a man with ravenous desires seeking sustenance, not relishes; the means of life, not the means of pampering the carcass; I wanted food.

And here I had it.  The hungry were to be fed.

It was a foul orgy, a gruesome spectacle, a horrible picture of the gluttony of famished men.  This meal conjured up visions of the “most unlovely of the functions.”  We fed on mien, that long, greasy, grimy, slippery, slimy string of boneless white—­I see it now!  And the half-done tin of sardines set before me, too, the broken stools in the thatch-worn shed, the dismantled hearth, the muddy earthen floor, the haggard, hungry villains—­I see them all again.[AS]

It should, however, be said that I went away from the main road over a range of hills where nobody lives.  Had I kept to the “ta lu” food would have been quite easy to get.

To Hungay was given the honor of entertaining me over the Sunday, a pleasant rest after a week of arduous and exhausting walking.  I arrived late at night, and the old town’s rough streets were bathed in a silver shower of moonbeams, the air was cold and frosty, little groups of the curious came to the doors of their dwellings, laughing sarcastically, despite their own poverty, at the distinguished traveler thus coming upon them.

In marked contrast to this outside animation were the happenings at the inn which gave me shelter.  Business was bad.  Three undistinguished travelers—­coolies with loads—­and myself and men made up the meager total of paying guests.  This was the reason why it was chosen for me, for peace and quiet.  Quiet had been forced upon the household, so I was told, by the death by fits of a haughty and resolute lady; and now that the night had fallen and we had all had our rice, the deep hush—­or its equivalent in Cathay, at all events—­seemed likely to be unbroken until a new day should dawn.  My room here had a verandah overlooking a back court, and here I sat at midnight, unseen by anyone, looking up to the changeless stars in an unpitying sky; and as I stood thus there blew from the gates of night and across the mountains a wind that made me shiver less with physical cold than with a sense of loneliness and captivity.  For on to my verandah came four soldiers, and it seemed as if the hour of death drew nigh; and as I looked again, first upon the cloudswept sky and upon the cold and steely glitter of the stars, and then again at the soldiers with their guns, I turned giddy, shuddering at the darkness and the loneliness, and with a nameless fear lying at the center of life like a lurking shadow of an unknown, unseen foe.