or on the boat
before your ablutions have been completed, and tells you politely but
firmly that he is to be your guide. His card says he is "Ah Cum John,"
which is not that of the guide you had expected to meet you, and you
meekly remonstrate, until the potentate tells you through the
half-opened door that you will see Canton under his auspices or not at
all. "Why?" "Because I am proprietor of all the sedan-chairs worth
riding in, and employ every good coolie; and, besides, Ah Cum, my
father, showed Canton to Rudyard Kipling twenty-five years ago. I'm the
third son of Ah Cum, and my family does all the guiding that is done in
Canton--nobody else speaks any English."

Whatever your degree of objection to monopolies, a single reason
enumerated by the autocrat seeking to enter your employ is sufficient to
swing you into a feeble acquiescence, for, to tell the truth, you are
not impressed favorably by the mob of jostling, shoving yellow humanity
on shore, naked to the waist, who seem to be accentuating with menacing
gestures their demands upon your patronage. You wonder how long a white
man can be on shore without having his throat cut, and reason that if Ah
Cum John can bully a sovereign-born American into accepting him as
guide, when you had wanted somebody else, why is he not the very man to
control the passions of a fanatical Chinese mob? His administrative
ability impresses by the manner in which he directs affairs from the
instant his control is confessed by your party of seven native
Americans, and after breakfast this born leader sets forth at the head
of the timid pleiad longing to explore the great human warren of
China--the thugs of the river bank are now your bearers and devoted
subjects, four to a chair, and countless assistants and relatives trail
at the end of the procession.

The cavalcade attracts good-natured attention from shopkeepers drawn to
the fronts of their stalls by the yelping of forty lusty Mongol throats,
commanding all and sundry wayfarers to allow honorable visitors to pass.
So narrow are the filth-smeared streets that a sight-seer might help
himself at will from shops on either side of the way. Hundreds of messes
stewing over braziers in the thoroughfare have to be moved, and now and
then the bearers of a native dignitary slide into a conveniently wide
place that the procession of "foreign devils" may not be inconvenienced.
But a mandarin, in his palanquin and preceded by an orderly mounted