It now becomes apparent that he has been mistaken from the beginning in regard to my wants:  instead of taking me to the Sam-shue gate, he has brought me to some kind of a house.  “Sam-shue, Sam-shue,” I explain, making gestures of disapproval at the house.  The young man regards me with a look of utter bewilderment, and forthwith betakes himself off to the outer edge of the crowd, henceforth contenting himself to join the general mass of open-eyed inquisitives.  Another attempt to again enlist his services only results in alienating his sympathies still further:  he has been grossly taken in by my assumption of intelligence.  Having discovered in me a jackass incapable of the Fat-shan pronunciation of Sam-shue, he retires on his dignity from further interest in my affairs.

Female faces peer curiously through little barred apertures in the gate, and grin amusedly at the sight of a Fankwae, as I stand for a few minutes uncertain of what course to pursue.  From sheer inability to conceive of anything else I seize upon a well-dressed youngster among the crowd, tender him a coin, and address him questioningly—­“Sam-shue lo.  Sam-shue lo.”  The youth regards me with monkeyish curiosity for a second, and then looks round at the crowd and giggles.  Nothing is plainer than the evidence that nobody present has the slightest conception of what I want to do, or where I wish to go.  Not that my pronunciation of Sam-shue is unintelligible (as I afterward discover), but they cannot conceive of a Fankwae in the streets of Fat-shan inquiring for Sam-shue; doubtless many have never heard of that city, and perhaps not one in the crowd has ever been there or knows anything of the road.  As a matter of fact, there is no “road,” and the best anyone could do would be to point out its direction in a general way.  All this, however, comes with after-knowledge.

Imagine a lone Chinaman who desired to learn the road to Philadelphia surrounded by a dense crowd in the Bowery, New York, and uttering the one word “Phaladilfi,” and the reader gains a feeble conception of my own predicament in Fat-shan, and the ludicrousness of the situation.  Finally the people immediately about me motion for me to proceed down the street.

Like a drowning man, I am willing to clutch wildly even at a straw, in the absence of anything more satisfactory, and so follow their directions.  Passing through squalid streets occupied by loathsome beggars, naked youngsters, slatternly women, matronly sows with Utters of young pigs, and mangy pariahs, we emerge into the more respectable business thoroughfares again, traversing streets that I recognize as having passed through an hour ago.  Having brought me here, the leaders in the latest movement seem to think they have accomplished their purpose, leaving me again to my own resources.