fellow greets you at your state-room door on the boat before your ablutions have been completed, and tells you politely but firmly that he is to be your guide. His card says he is "Ah Cum John," which is not that of the guide you had expected to meet you, and you meekly remonstrate, until the potentate tells you through the half-opened door that you will see Canton under his auspices or not at all. "Why?" "Because I am proprietor of all the sedan-chairs worth riding in, and employ every good coolie; and, besides, Ah Cum, my father, showed Canton to Rudyard Kipling twenty-five years ago. I'm the third son of Ah Cum, and my family does all the guiding that is done in Canton—nobody else speaks any English."
Whatever your degree of objection to monopolies, a single reason enumerated by the autocrat seeking to enter your employ is sufficient to swing you into a feeble acquiescence, for, to tell the truth, you are not impressed favorably by the mob of jostling, shoving yellow humanity on shore, naked to the waist, who seem to be accentuating with menacing gestures their demands upon your patronage. You wonder how long a white man can be on shore without having his throat cut, and reason that if Ah Cum John can bully a sovereign-born American into accepting him as guide, when you had wanted somebody else, why is he not the very man to control the passions of a fanatical Chinese mob? His administrative ability impresses by the manner in which he directs affairs from the instant his control is confessed by your party of seven native Americans, and after breakfast this born leader sets forth at the head of the timid pleiad longing to explore the great human warren of China—the thugs of the river bank are now your bearers and devoted subjects, four to a chair, and countless assistants and relatives trail at the end of the procession.
The cavalcade attracts good-natured attention from shopkeepers drawn to the fronts of their stalls by the yelping of forty lusty Mongol throats, commanding all and sundry wayfarers to allow honorable visitors to pass. So narrow are the filth-smeared streets that a sight-seer might help himself at will from shops on either side of the way. Hundreds of messes stewing over braziers in the thoroughfare have to be moved, and now and then the bearers of a native dignitary slide into a conveniently wide place that the procession of "foreign devils" may not be inconvenienced. But a mandarin, in his palanquin and preceded by an orderly mounted on a short-legged pony, and guarded front and rear by forty wicked-looking soldiers armed with carbines, has precedence so instantly accorded him that the clients of Ah Cum's third son are almost precipitated sideways into a row of shops. The mighty official passes without so much as casting a glance of compliment at the women of the party, thereby making it evident that Canton mandarins have a code of deportment peculiarly their own.
The products of every section of Asia are said Canton, Unique City of China to be heaped high in the warehouses of this great mart of Southern China; but the tourist sees naught of these. What he views from his sedan-chair is thousands of shops but little larger than catacomb cells, wherein everything from straw sandals for street coolies to jade bracelets for the richly endowed is offered for sale. Preserved from theft and fire in Canton's godowns and pawnshops are stored enough fabrics of silk, art-embroideries, and carvings in ivory and teakwood, to cause a person of average taste to lose his mind, could they be paraded for his benefit; and a collector would find it difficult to preserve solvency, were the treasures of the shabby-looking warehouses proffered for sale. Unusually repugnant are the stalls where food is vended, for their wares are prepared in a manner making it easy for the visitor to forget that he ever possessed an appetite. A hundred times as you are borne through Canton's streets your chair escapes by only a few feet or inches rows of cooked ducks and pigs that seem to have been finally varnished to make them appeal to the native epicure. Here and there you observe strange hunks of meat held together by a wisp of straw that your guide tells you with immobile countenance are rat hams, and in sundry shops your ready eye thereafter detects tiny dried carcasses that can only be rats. Let it be said in fairness to the sights of Canton that the display of vegetables is attractive enough to turn your thoughts to the dietary benefits of vegetarianism.
You early perceive that Ah Cum John is many kinds of a "boss" by the way he takes command of the shops at which he deigns to halt his caravan. All are charmed with the jewelry fabricated by the workers in kingfishers' feathers, and make liberal selections. But you are not permitted to pay the merchant with whom you have made a bargain, for John says, "You pay him nothing, you pay me to-night for everything"—and the purchases are carried away in his sumptuous palanquin. Pictures executed on rice-paper are next acquired on the same terms; then a cargo of daggers and swords with handles and scabbards covered with shark skin is secured after a brief dicker. When you buy a carved ivory ball representing years of labor by a genius, or a dozen bolts of Chee-fu silk, the price of which may be several hundred Mexican dollars, John insists that you are entitled to a cumsha of value. The merchant makes obeisance and proffers you a paper-cutter or a box of candied ginger. John resents this parsimony and says "Not good enough." He goes then behind the counter and pulls down a mandarin coat weighted with embroidery, or maybe an intricately carved puff-box, saying "The merchant gives you this with his compliments." Everything is dumped in the gorgeous palanquin, and your spoliation dash through commercial Canton is resumed.
CITY OF BOATS, CANTON, WHERE GENERATIONS ARE BORN AND DIE
Between purchases, you are taken to see innumerable temples and other objects of interest, as they fall in your path. The Temple of the Five Hundred Genii is made amusing by the scion of
the house of Ah Cum explaining that a figure sculptured with hat of European pattern is "Joss Pau Low." As a reader you are aware that it is the effigy of Marco Polo, the intrepid Italian traveler supposed to have been the first European to have penetrated ancient China. The water-clock, elsewhere, is found to be out of order and not running, and you assume that the water of the Pearl River is too muddy for delicate mechanisms. The execution ground is found to be merely a quadrilateral of vacant land, employed by native potters when not required by the State when a group of criminals is to be officially put to death.