er of the Pei-ho....

But one afternoon I found our water had run out.

So I took the gourd used by the Chinese crew, and dipped up, as they
did, the river water.

The captain clutched me by the wrist.

"Don't drink that water! If you'd seen what I have, floating in it,
you'd be afraid!"

"What won't hurt a Chinaman, won't hurt me," I boasted....

The result of my folly was a mild case of dysentery....

In a few days I was so weak that I went around as if I had no bones left
in my body. And I wanted to leave the country. And I repaired to Captain
---- who had given me the job, and asked him for my pay and my
discharge. He lit into me, disgusted, upbraiding me for a worthless
tramp....

"I might have known that you were of that ilk, from the first, just by
looking at you!"

He handed me the eighty dollars in Mexican silver, that was coming to
me.... I repaid the captain the forty I had borrowed, for food.

"Sick! yes, sick of laziness!"

Captain ---- was partly right. I had an uncontrollable distaste for the
monotony of daily work, repeated in the same environment, surrounded by
the same scenery ... but I was also quite weak and sick, and I am
persuaded, that, if I had stayed on there, I might have died.

* * * * *

I sat on one of the wharves and played host to a crowd of romantic
thoughts that moved in their pageant through my brain ... now I would go
on to Pekin and see the great Forbidden City. Now I would dress in
Chinese clothes and beg my way through the very heart of the Chinese
Empire ... and write a book, subsequently, about my experiences and
adventures ... and perhaps win a medal of some famous society for it ...
and I had a dream of marrying some quaintly beautiful mandarin's
daughter, of becoming a famous, revered Chinese scholar, bringing
together with my influence the East and the West....

I reached so far, in the dream, as to buy several novels of the Chinese,
printed in their characters, of an itinerant vendor....

The everyday world swung into my ken again.

Three junks, laden with American marines, dropping down the river from
Pekin, cut across my abstracted gaze ... the boys were singing.

They marched off on the dock on which I sat. They were stationed right
where they deployed from the junks. Men were put in guard over them.

At Tien Tsin they had behaved rather badly, I was told by one of
them,--had gone on a Samshu jag ... a Chinese drink, wor