t nation here within our city, and at every chance their numbers are
constantly increased. I do not understand this question of police.
There are in thousands of our cities and villages no police, no
soldiers, yet there is less lawlessness and vice in a dozen purely
Chinese cities than in this great mongrel town that spends many tens
of thousands of taels each year upon these guardians of the people's
peace. It seems to me that this should tell the world that the force of
China is not a physical force, but the force of the law-abiding instinct
of a happy common people, who, although living on the verge of
misery and great hunger, live upright lives and do not try to break their
country's laws.

There is a garden within our walls, but not a garden of winding
pathways and tiny bridges leading over lotus ponds, nor are there
hillocks of rockery with here and there a tiny god or temple peeping
from some hidden grotto. All is flat, with long bare stretches of green
grass over which are nets, by which my children play a game called
tennis. This game is foolish, in my eyes, and consists of much
jumping and useless waste of strength, but the English play it, and of
course the modern Chinese boy must imitate them. I have made one
rule: my daughters shall not play the game. It seems to me most
shameful to see a woman run madly, with great boorish strides, in
front of men and boys. My daughters pout and say it is played by all
the girls in school, and that it makes them strong and well; but I am
firm. I have conceded many things, but this to me is vulgar and
unseemly.

Need I tell thee, Mother mine, that I am a stranger in this great city,
that my heart calls for the hills and the mountain-side with its ferns
and blossoms? Yesterday at the hour of twilight I drove to the country
in the motor (a new form of carrying chair that thou wouldst not
understand-- or like) and I stopped by a field of flowering mustard. The
scent brought remembrance to my heart, and tears flowed from
beneath my eyelids. The delicate yellow blossoms seemed to speak
to me from out their golden throats, and I yearned to hold within my
arms all this beauty of the earth flowering beneath my feet. We
stayed until the darkness came, and up to the blue night rose from all
the fields "that great soft, bubbling chorus which seems the very voice
of the earth itself-- the chant of the frogs." When we turned back and
saw the vulgar houses, with straight red tops and p