The Piping Costs
The colored minister had just concluded a powerful sermon on “Salvation is Free” and was announcing that a collection would be taken. Up jumped a brother in the back of the church. “If salvation is free,” he interrupted, “what’s the use paying for it? I’m going to give you nothing till I find out. Now—”
“Patience, brother, patience,” said the parson. “I’ll illustrate. Suppose you were thirsty and came to a river. You could kneel right down and drink, couldn’t you? And it would cost you nothing, would it?”
“Of course not. That’s just what I—”
“That water would be free,” continued the parson. “But supposing you were to have that water piped to your house, you would have to pay, would you not?”
“Yes, sir, but—”
“Well, brother, salvation is free, but it is the having it piped to you that you got to pay for. Pass the hat, sexton.”
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It was rather quiet at the postoffice the other day and outside of the Whiz Bang mail our genial postmaster, Bud Nasset, sorted out only two letters. The first one was addressed to Deacon Miller from his son, reading as follows: “Dear Father—I am in jail. Son.” The Deacon’s answer was the other letter, “Dear Son—So am I. Father.”
Chinese Nightmare Cities
BY REV. “GOLIGHTLY” MORRILL
Pastor People’s Church, Minneapolis, Minn.
All aboard for China, the country of Confucius and chop suey! At Canton a wonderful spectacle took place at the wharf. A sampan man had beaten his wife and thrown her on the dock where she sat and chanted in a monotonous voice while a hundred coolies gathered round and watched the interesting ceremony. She referred to her husband and his ancestors, then scraped up a little pile of dirt, spat on it, molded it into the image of a man, addressed it with a few words, suddenly knelt and foully insulted it, and so eased her conscience, balanced the books of honor and “saved her face.”
From the Hotel Victoria in the Shameen, or Foreign Quarter, two cadaverous coolies carried me in a coffin-shaped sedan chair across a stinking canal into native Canton. My guide, Ah Cum, led the way. The streets were so narrow and the show windows so near that I could have been a shoplifter with both hands. If hungry, there was a free lunch counter extending along the streets with tea and rice, live fish, glazed ducks, gory pigs, a choice assortment of fresh entrails, some dead dogs and rats, crates of yowling cats, and huge pots of slimy soup thickened with animal, vegetable and other matter that would make the Witches’ Cauldron in “Macbeth” look like a cup of consomme in comparison.
At the Temple of the Five Hundred Genii, where the prayers of the holy had given way to the harangues of the politicians, I saw a gilded statue big as life of the first European globe-trotter to China, Marco Polo. Such a traveler was a novelty then, but now is a nuisance. I went by old walls whose painted dragons the new Chinese had wiped out; by temples whose only occupants were a few second-hand gods and bats; took time to visit the water-clock tower where drops of water instead of grains of sand mark the time of China’s millions towards the grave; passed through gates of the old city wall to the hillside where hundreds had been shot; looked into the graveyard where the poor common people rest after life’s fitful fever, while the restless rich, who shunned them in life, lie apart from them in the City of the Dead.
Like mummies in a museum, they sleep unburied in their rich caskets and await the grafting geomancer, that oriental undertaker, who promises the relatives to find some place in the ground undisturbed by the Great Dragon. By the religious milestone of the five-storied, weedy, seedy Pagoda, whose oracles are dumb, I headed for the Execution Grounds in the pottery district where the sharp sword had sent many a man back to his original clay.
China is becoming civilized now and stands her criminals up against a wall and shoots them. Here was a narrow alley lined with earthen pots covered with mats, under which were fleshless skulls. One of them seemed to look imploringly at me, and I picked it up. Alas, some poor Chinese Yorick! I was anxious to see the man who struck the fearful blows, and Ah Cum called the executioner who came out with a knife estimated to have cut off 300,000 heads in thirty years. There is a death here by “seventy-two cuts,” but one from his sword was enough.
Bayard Taylor said China was a good place to leave, and I was not very sorry when the whistle blew to cast off and say good-bye to the city of dreadful sights, sounds, suffering and smells. Leaving the grotesque outline of an old fort, a little island stained by some dark murder, a place where pirates had scuttled a ship, a picturesque Pagoda looking like an eight-story Easter bonnet, Grecian-bend shaped junk-boats and sampans like big, broken barrels floating along, we sailed down the Pearl River and at midnight reached the Portuguese town of Macao. On deck we were surprised to find the officers embracing the coolies. Were they trying to relieve them of their hard-earned spoils of fan-tan which they had won during the night? No, the honest officials were only searching for concealed arms, but found only those which Nature had allowed and provided.
An illuminated sign, “First-class Gambling House,” drew my attention. Gambling, next to loafing and the manufacture of opium, is the principal occupation of the youngest and oldest inhabitants. Macao is the Oriental Monte Carlo. Gambling here is backed by the government which gets back a certain per cent of the earnings which it invests in hospitals, asylums and cheap lodgings for the people who have been beaten at the game. At this gambling-hell one could play at the big table downstairs, or drop into the game by lowering his money in a small basket from the balcony above. Tired of the game, the player recuperates his wasted energies here by eating bird-nest soup and shark-fins, or drinking Portuguese wines. If he is sleepy, he may take the opium-pipe train of thought to the Flowery Land where every-day is Sunday.
At a “song-parlor” some Chinese dolls amused us with their squeaky voices and knife-scraping music. It sadly recalled my visit to a Hongkong house of pleasure whose almond-eyed inmates illustrated Confucius’ remark that “women had no souls,” and the Chinese philosophy which attributes death and evil to Yin, the female principle in Nature. Their artificially whitened and rouged faces were ghastly, and their flower-and-jewel-bedecked hair glued down to the skull was anything but attractive to an Occidental eye. Their lips were red like the dawn of day, their complexions like congealed ointment, and their betel-nut-stained teeth like black watermelon seeds. They unfurled painted fans, sipped tea, nibbled sweetmeats, puffed at opium-pipes, and looked quite flowery in their blue collars, purple tunics and bright green trousers. I wonder if the men, whom they were entertaining, remembered the Chinese proverb, “There is no such poison in the green snake’s mouth or in the hornet’s sting as in a woman’s heart.”
After visiting next day a firecracker factory, temples, joss-houses, and a tobacco plant where little children and old women were at work sorting the leaves, I was conducted to Macao’s notorious opium factory. I entered a low-ceiling room where men were stripped to their waists like blacksmiths at the forge. They picked up the crude opium, shaped like a cocoanut shell, scooped out the chocolate-looking substance, threw it into a kind of brass wash-basin under which roared the fire, until it steamed and blubbered like a pot of hot mush or molasses. They darted here and there like imps with these pans. Then the liquid was poured in porcelain boxes of various sizes. The whole place seemed like a Devil’s smithyshop where chains were being forged for lost souls. The odor was peculiar and penetrating. I must have absorbed some of the dope, for I felt dizzy and was glad to get outside in the fresh air.
There is no more melancholy sight, in China’s teeming nightmare cities, than a drug-befuddled victim staggering out in the early dawn from some hasheesh house and tumbling down in the street where he dreams he is in the Celestial City with his ancestors. When he is rudely awakened by a hungry rat gnawing his hand or foot, the golden vision vanishes. In the cold light of the morning, racked with nameless pains, he crawls off to work at some mean job, hoping to make enough for another night’s opium dream in which to forget the hell of this tormenting world.
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