ese ply for amusement and the pleasure of
whistling, and are held in such small esteem that every hotel owns one,
and the others are masterless. Beyond the launches lie more steamers
than the eye can count, and four out of five of these belong to Us. I
was proud when I saw the shipping at Singapur, but I swell with
patriotism as I watch the fleets of Hong-Kong from the balcony of the
Victoria Hotel. I can almost spit into the water; but many mariners
stand below and they are a strong breed.

How recklessly selfish does a traveller become! We had dropped for more
than ten days all the world outside our trunks, and almost the first
word in the hotel was: "John Bright is dead, and there has been an awful
hurricane at Samoa."

"Ah! indeed that's very sad; but look here, where do you say my rooms
are?" At home the news would have given talk for half a day. It was
dismissed in half the length of a hotel corridor. One cannot sit down to
think with a new world humming outside the window--with all China to
enter upon and possess.

A rattling of trunks in the halls--a click of heels--and the apparition
of an enormous gaunt woman wrestling with a small Madrassi servant....
"Yes--I haf travelled everywhere and I shall travel everywhere else. I
go now to Shanghai and Pekin. I have been in Moldavia, Russia, Beyrout,
all Persia, Colombo, Delhi, Dacca, Benares, Allahabad, Peshawar, the Ali
Musjid in that pass, Malabar, Singapur, Penang, here in this place, and
Canton. I am Austrian-Croat, and I shall see the States of America and
perhaps Ireland. I travel for ever; I am--how you call?--_veuve_--widow.
My husband, he was dead; and so I am sad--I am always sad und so I
trafel. I am alife of course, but I do not live. You onderstandt? Always
sad. Vill you tell them the name of the ship to which they shall warf my
trunks now. You trafel for pleasure? So! I trafel because I am alone und
sad--always sad."

The trunks disappeared, the door shut, the heels clicked down the
passage, and I was left scratching my head in wonder. How did that
conversation begin--why did it end, and what is the use of meeting
eccentricities who never explained themselves? I shall never get an
answer, but that conversation is true, every word of it. I see now where
the fragmentary school of novelists get their material from.

When I went into the streets of Hong-Kong I stepped into thick slushy
London mud of the kind that strikes chilly through the boot, and th