some roast beef, mashed potatoes and a cup of tea," you give the numbers
of these several articles, or point to them,--and they are fetched. It
is easy enough to get a second helping, but if you desire your meat
rare, or well done, or your eggs fried on both sides, then you have good
cause for cursing the confounding of tongues at the Tower of Babel. A
Hong Kong hotel is not a place for a person predisposed to irritability.

For keen realization of the Far East, Hong Kong, with its streets of
Chinese shops, and water front massed with sampans, affords a full and
most satisfying opportunity.

CHAPTER XII

CANTON, UNIQUE CITY OF CHINA

It is a steamboat journey of but ninety miles up the estuary of the
Pearl River from Hong Kong to wonderful Canton, and a traveler in Asia
who fails to see the city that is the commercial capital of China misses
something that he may think and talk of the remainder of his life.
Historians profess to trace the origin of Canton to a period antedating
the Christian era, when, it is somewhere recorded, the thirty-fourth
sovereign of the Chan dynasty, by name Nan Wong, who ruled for nearly
sixty years, was on the Chinese throne. In those days the city bore the
name of Nan-Woo-Ching, meaning "The Martial City of the South," and was
encircled by a stockade formed of bamboos and river mud, tradition has
it. Tradition additionally tells us that in the shadowy past Canton used
to be known as the "City of the Rams," inasmuch as once upon a time five
genii, each mounted on a ram carrying ears of grain in the mouth, rode
into the market-place and said to the wondering people, "May famine and
dearth never visit your city." This benevolent sentiment uttered, the
genii are said to have instantly vanished, leaving their steeds in the
market-place, and forthwith these were turned into stone. There is
to-day a Temple of the Five Genii, where five clumsily sculptured rams
are pointed out as the identical animals that once were flesh and blood.

Passing over twenty centuries we find the metropolis of the present
time, with its two million people, the most satisfying, fascinating, and
puzzling city in the Orient, if not in the whole world. Canton with its
agglomeration of a primitive existence, is surely distinct and different
from any other city. Its dazzling color effect, its pile of massive
gilding in grotesque ornamentation, its wonderful sign-boards in
bewildering hieroglyphics, and its host of