c
appetite on the first floor, where the plebeian stomach is stayed with
tea and lentils, even to the very housetop, where are administered
comforting syrups and a menu that is sweetened throughout its length
with the twang of lutes, the clash of cymbals, and the throb of the
shark-skin drum.

Servants slip to and fro in sandals, offering edible birds'-nests,
sharks'-fins, and beche de mer,--or are these unfamiliar dishes snatched
from some other kingdom? At any rate, they are native to the strange
people who have a little world of their own in our midst, and who could,
if they chose, declare their independence tomorrow.

We see everywhere the component parts of a civilization separate and
distinct from our own. They have their exists and their entrances;
their religious life and burial; their imports, exports, diversions,
tribunals, punishments. They are all under the surveillance of the six
companies, the great six-headed supreme authority. They have laws within
our laws that to us are sealed volumes.

*****

After supper we leaned from the high balcony, among flowers and
lanterns, and looked down upon the street below; it was midnight, yet
the pavements were not deserted, and there arose to our ears a murmur as
of a myriad humming bees shut in clustering hives; close about us
were housed near twenty thousand souls; shops were open; discordant
orchestras resounded from the theaters; in a dark passage we saw the
flames playing upon the thresholds of infamy to expel the evil shades.

Away off in the Bay in the moonlight glimmered the ribbed sail of a
fishing-junk, and the air was heavy with an indefinable odor which
to this hour puzzles me; but it must be attributed either to sink or
sandalwood--perchance to both!

"It is a little bit of old China, this quarter of ours," said the
artist, rising to go. And so it is, saving only a noticeable lack of
dwarfed trees and pale pagodas and sprays of willowy bamboo; of clumsy
boats adrift on tideless streams; of toy-like tea-gardens hanging among
artificial rocks, and of troops of flat-faced but complaisant people
posing grotesquely in ridiculous perspective.

End of Project Gutenberg's A Bit of Old China, by Charles Warren Stoddard

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A BIT OF OLD CHINA ***

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