owing to the absence of the missionaries on a journey to Batang.
But I was greatly impressed by the truly beautiful face and dignified
bearing of a native pastor who called upon me at my lodgings. Fine,
serene, pure of countenance, he might have posed for a Buddha or a
Chinese St. John. In my limited experience of the Chinese, the men who
stand out from their fellows for beauty of expression and attractiveness
of manner are two or three Christians of the better class. Naturally
fine-featured and of dignified presence, the touch of the Christian
faith seems to have transformed the supercilious impassiveness of their
class into a serenity full of charm. It is a pity that it is not more
often so, but the zeal of the West mars as well as mends, and in
imparting Western beliefs and Western learning carelessly and needlessly
destroys Eastern ideals of conduct and manner, often more reasonable and
more attractive than our own. The complacent cocksureness of the
Occidental attitude toward Oriental ways and standards has little to
rest on. We have reviled the people of the East in the past for their
unwillingness to admit that there was anything we could teach them, and
they are amending their ways, but we have shown and show still a
stupidity quite equal to theirs in our refusal to learn of them. Take,
for example, the small matter of manners,--if it be a small matter. More
than one teacher in America has confessed the value of the object lesson
in good breeding given by the chance student from the East, but how few
Westerners in China show any desire to pattern after the dignified,
courteous bearing of the Chinese gentleman. I have met bad manners in
the Flowery Kingdom, but not among the natives.

It had been a long, hard pull from Ning-yuean-fu; two weeks' continuous
travelling is a tax upon every one, but at no place had we found
comfortable quarters for the whole of the party, and as the men
preferred to push on, I was not inclined to object. But usually a
seventh-day rest is very acceptable to them; so we were all glad for a
little breathing-space in Tachienlu. The servants and coolies spent the
first day in a general tidying-up, getting a shave, face and head, and
having their queues washed and combed and replaited. Some also made
themselves fine in new clothes, but others were content to wash the old.
As none of them, with the exception of the fu t'ou, had ever been in
Tachienlu before, they were as keen to see the sigh