. The excellent Ah Cum led us to the Viceroy's summer garden-house
on the cityward slope of an azalea-covered hill surrounded by cotton
trees. The basement, was a handsome joss house: upstairs was a
durbar-hall with glazed verandahs and ebony furniture ranged across the
room in four straight lines. It was only an oasis of cleanliness. Ten
minutes later we were back in the swarming city, cut off from light and
sweet air. Once or twice we met a mandarin with thin official mustache
and "little red button a-top." Ah Cum was explaining the nature and
properties of a mandarin when we came to a canal spanned by an English
bridge and closed by an iron gate, which was in charge of a Hong-Kong
policeman. We were in an Indian station with Europe shops and Parsee
shops and everything else to match. This was English Canton, with two
hundred and fifty sahibs in it. 'Twould have been better for a Gatling
behind the bridge gate. The guide-books tell you that it was taken from
the Chinese by the treaty of 1860, the French getting a similar slice of
territory. Owing to the binding power of French officialism, "La
concession Francaise" has never been let or sold to private individuals,
and now a Chinese regiment squats on it. The men who travel tell you
somewhat similar tales about land in Saigon and Cambodia. Something
seems to attack a Frenchman as soon as he dons a colonial uniform. Let
us call it the red-tape-worm.

"Now where did you go and what did you see?" said the Professor, in the
style of the pedagogue, when we were once more on the _Ho-nam_ and
returning as fast as steam could carry us to Hong-Kong.

"A big blue sink of a city full of tunnels, all dark and inhabited by
yellow devils, a city that Dore ought to have seen. I'm devoutly
thankful that I'm never going back there. The Mongol will begin to march
in his own good time. I intend to wait until he marches up to me. Let us
go away to Japan by the next boat."

The Professor says that I have completely spoiled the foregoing account
by what he calls "intemperate libels on a hard-working nation." He did
not see Canton as I saw it--through the medium of a fevered imagination.

Once, before I got away, I climbed to the civil station of Hong-Kong,
which overlooks the town. There in sumptuous stone villas built on the
edge of the cliff and facing shaded roads, in a wilderness of beautiful
flowers and a hushed calm unvexed even by the roar of the traffic below,
the residents do t