Hip Tee examines it and shakes his head.  “No good—­oder man,” he says, and points up the street.  You are now perplexed and somewhat alarmed.  You say:  “John, I want my clothes.  I left them here last Monday.  You gave me that ticket.”  “No,” replies Hip Tee very decidedly, “oder man;” and again he waves his arm upward.  Then you are wroth.  You abuse, expostulate, entreat, and talk a great deal of English, and some of it very strong English, which Hip Tee does not understand; and Hip Tee talks a great deal of Chinese, and perhaps strong Chinese, which you do not understand.  You commence sentences in broken Chinese and terminate them in unbroken English.  Hip Tee commences sentences in broken English and terminates them in pure Chinese, from a like inability to express his indignation in a foreign tongue.  “What for you no go oder man?  No my ticket—­tung sung lung, ya hip kee—­ping!" he cries; and all this time the assistants are industriously ironing and spouting mist, and leisurely making remarks in their sing-song unintelligibility which you feel have uncomplimentary reference to yourself.  Suddenly a light breaks upon you.  This is not Hip Tee’s cellar, this is not Hip Tee.  It is the establishment of Hi Sing.  This is Hi Sing himself who for the last half hour has been endeavoring with his stock of fifteen English words to make you understand that you are in the wrong house.  But these Chinese, as to faces and their wash-houses, and all the paraphernalia of their wash-houses, are so much alike that this is an easy mistake to make.  You find the lavatory of Hip Tee, who pronounces the hieroglyphics all correct, and delivers you your lost and found shirts clean, with half the buttons broken, and the bosoms pounded, scrubbed and frayed into an irregular sort of embroidery.

“He can only dig, cook and wash,” said the American miner contemptuously years ago:  “he can’t work rock.”  To work rock in mining parlance is to be skillful in boring Earth’s stony husk after mineral.  It is to be proficient in sledging, drilling and blasting.  The Chinaman seemed to have no aptitude for this labor.  He was content to use his pick and shovel in the gravel-banks:  metallic veins of gold, silver or copper he left entirely to the white man.

Yet it was a great mistake to suppose he could not “work rock,” or do anything else required of him.  John is a most apt and intelligent labor-machine.  Show him once your tactics in any operation, and ever after he imitates them as accurately as does the parrot its memorized sentences.  So when the Pacific Railroad was being bored through the hard granite of the Sierras it was John who handled the drill and sledge as well as the white laborer.  He was hurled by thousands on that immense work, and it was the tawny hand of China that hewed out hundreds of miles for the transcontinental pathway.  Nor is this all.  He is crowding into one avenue of employment after another in California.  He fills our woolen-