of us. And at
my request we dismissed the jinrikishas and walked back to the tarven
with her.

Dorothy and Miss Meechim and Robert Strong come back pretty soon from
a tower of sight-seein', and they said we'd all been invited to tiffen
with the Governor-General the next day. Well, I didn't have the least
idee what it wuz, but I made up my mind to once that if tiffenin' wuz
anything relatin' to gamblin' or the opium trade, I shouldn't have a
thing to do with it. But Josiah spoke right up and sez he had rather
see tiffen than anybody else in China, and mistrustin' from Robert's
looks that he had made a mistake, he hastened to add that tiffenin'
wuz sunthin' he had always hankered after; he had always wanted to
tiffen, but hadn't the means in Jonesville.

Sez Robert, "Then I shall accept this invitation for breakfast for all
our party." And after they went out I sez: "I'd hold myself a little
back, Josiah. To say that you'd never had means to take breakfast in
Jonesville shows ignorance and casts a slur on me."

"Oh, I meant I never had any tiffen with it, Samantha; you'll see it
don't mean plain breakfast; you'll see that they'll pass some tiffen,
and we shall have to eat it no matter what it's made on, rats or mice
or anything. Whoever heard of common breakfast at twelve M.?"

Well, it did mean just breakfast, and we had a real good time. We went
up in sedan chairs, though we might have gone on the cars. But we
wanted to go slower to enjoy the scenery.

I had thought the view from the hill back of Grout Nickleson's wuz
beautiful, and also the Pali at Honolulu, but it did seem to me that
the seen we looked down on from the top of Victoria mountain wuz the
most beautiful I ever did see. The city lay at our feet embowered in
tropical foliage, with its handsome uneek buildin's, its narrer
windin' streets stretchin' fur up the mountain side, runnin' into
narrerer mountain paths covered with white sand. The beautiful houses
and gardens of the English colony clost down to the shore. The tall
masts of the vessels in the harbor looking like a water forest with
flowers of gayly colored flags. And further off the Canton or Pearl
River, with scores of villages dotting its banks; glittering white
temples, with their pinnacles glistening in the sunlight; pagodas,
gayly painted with gilded bells, rising up from the beautiful tropical
foliage; broad green fields; mountains soarin' up towards the blue
heavens and the blue waters of