road
streets, well lighted and clean. We went on the Bubbling Well Road,
named from a boiling spring a few miles out. The road is broad and
smooth as glass with beautiful villas along the way; we also passed a
great number of small burying places. They have to bury folks
according to the rules of Feng Shui. If Feng Shui should order a
burial place in a dooryard it would have to be there. It rules
buildings, customs, laws, everything. I asked a Chinaman who could
talk English what this Feng Shui wuz that they had to obey it so
strictly, and he described it as being like the wind and water: like
wind because you don't know where it come from nor when it would go or
where; and like water because you could never know how to grasp it, it
would elude you and slip away and you would have nothing in your hand
to show. Miss Meechim cried out about the enormity of such a law and
laid it to the evil doin's of furriners, but Arvilly said that it wuz
some like the laws we had in America, for we found out on inquiry that
money would most always appease this great Feng Shui and git it to
consent to most anything if it wuz paid enough, just as it did in
America.

Josiah said he had a good mind to set up some such thing in
Jonesville when he got back, sez he, "I wouldn't name it Feng Shui
just like this, I might call it Fine Shue or sunthin' like that. And
jest see, Samantha, how handy it would be if the meetin' house went
aginst me I would jest git up and lift up my hand and say, 'Fine Shue
has decided. It will be as I say.' Or on 'lection day, if I wuzn't put
up for office, or when they elect somebody besides me, or at the
cheese factory if they put up another salesman, or on the beat, if
they wanted another pathmaster, I'd jest call on the Fine Shue and
there I'd be. Why, Samantha," sez he, gittin' carried away in his
excitement, "I could git to be President jest as easy as fallin' off a
log if I could make the Fine Shue work."

"Yes," sez I, "but that is a big if; but do you want to, Josiah, turn
back the wheels of our civilization that are creaky and jolty enough,
heaven knows, back into worse and more swampy paths than they are
runnin' in now?"

"I d'no," sez Josiah, "but it would be all right if it wuz run by a
man like me; a Methodist in full standin', and one of the most
enlightened and Christian men of the times."

But I lifted my hand in a warnin' way and sez, "Stop, Josiah Allen, to
once! such talk is imperialism, and