boat for the Gorges trip, and
one by one our troubles vanished.

Laying in stores, however, was not the lightest of sundry perplexities.
Curry and rice had been suggested as the staple diet for the river
journey; and we ordered, with no thought to the contrary, a picul of
best rice, various brands of curries, which were raked from behind the
shelves of a dingy little store in a back street, and presented to us
at alarming prices--enough to last a regiment of soldiers for pretty
well the number of days we two were to travel; and, for luxuries, we
laid in a few tinned meats. All was practically settled, when The Other
Man, settling his eyes dead upon me, yelled--

"Dingle, you've forgotten the milk!" And then, after a moment, "Oh,
well, we can surely do without milk; it's no use coming on a journey
like this unless one can rough it a bit." And he ended up with a rude
reference to the disgusting sticky condensed milk tins, and we wandered
on.

Suddenly he stopped, did The Other Man. He looked at a small stone on
the pavement for a long time, eventually cruelly blurting out, directly
at me, as if it were all my misdoing: "The sugar, the sugar! We _must_
have sugar, man." I said nothing, with the exception of a slight remark
that we might do without sugar, as we were to do without milk. There was
a pause. Then, raising his stick in the air, The Other Man perorated:
"Now, I have no wish to quarrel" (and he put his nose nearer to mine),
"you know that, of course. But to _think_ we can do without sugar is
quite unreasonable, and I had no idea you were such a cantankerous man.
We have sugar, or--I go back."

* * * * *

We had sugar. It was brought on board in upwards of twenty small packets
of that detestable thin Chinese paper, and The Other Man, with
commendable meekness, withdrew several pleasantries he had unwittingly
dropped anent deficiencies in my upbringing. Fifty pounds of this sugar
were ordered, and sugar--that dirty, brown sticky stuff--got into
everything on board--my fingers are sticky even as I write--and no less
than exactly one-half went down to the bottom of the Yangtze. Travelers
by houseboat on the Upper Yangtze should have some knowledge of
commissariat.

Getting away was a tedious business.

Later, the fellows pressed us to spend a good deal of time in the small,
dingy, ill-lighted apartment they are pleased to call their club; and
the skipper had to recommission his