And I ...
... in unavailing pity sat
Still as a crystal, smiling as a cat.”
Let us turn down this narrow lane. Now we have left the shops and the busy street. Look at the rows of smallish houses, each with a bit of plain wall and a bamboo screen hanging in front of the door. You hear the sound of children’s voices within as you pass. How happy that little boy is, running along in bright red trousers, flying his kite. His home is near by; when he is older he will go to school, or learn a trade in one of the shops not far away.
Here the streets are narrower. What strange names they have! Stone Bird Lane, Grinding Row, Old Woo’s Lane, Bean Curd Lane, Family Ma’s Market.
Look at this big house. Turn in by the opening at the right of the front door. Now we are inside the first court, an open space with rooms all around. The room in front of us is the largest in the house. A wooden cabinet stands on the narrow table against the back wall: it is full of slips of wood, each about a foot high. These slips of wood are called ‘ancestral tablets,’ because the Chinese think that the souls of their ancestors live in them. Each one has writing upon it, telling the name of the person whose soul is said to be inside.
To right and left of the chief room are two smaller ones, used as bedrooms. Behind these again is another court, with rooms ranged round it like the front one, and behind it perhaps another. Some houses have ‘five descents’; for Chinese storeys, which are called ‘descents,’ are put one behind the other, instead of being piled upwards as are ours.
You may see a girl seated at a loom, driving the shuttle to and fro. How slowly the cloth grows. Every time the shuttle flies across, the web gains a line. Thread by thread it lengthens, just as a child’s life lengthens day by day; that is why the Chinese proverb says, “Days and months are like a shuttle, light and dark fly like an arrow.” The older boys of the household are at school or at work. That woman who is washing rice in an earthen pot, has a baby slung by a checked cotton cloth upon her back. The child rolls its bullet head and sucks a fat thumb, whilst one dumpy foot sticks out below its mother’s arm. The lady in a blue tunic, with bright flowers in her hair, is the mistress of the house; see how she sways on her tiny bound feet, as she moves across the tiled floor.
CHILD LEADING BUFFALO