Before starting on this around-the-world trip a friend of mine in the United States said to me: "When you get to Shanghai look up my friend, Dr. "John Blank." He has been in China over thirty years. He is the biggest individual intellectual asset in China today—the founder and moving spirit of an International Institute which recognizes the good in all religions and gives them all a hearing.
"He is a graduate of Hamilton College in your town of Clinton. He is a strong, a busy man, and true. Please look him up and arrest his attention long enough to give him my regards"—and I promised this enthusiastic friend of "John Blank's" I would do this thing.
"Missouri" had, by rare good luck, driven his business in Japan ahead of him to such purpose that he was ready to sail on the same ship that brought me from Nagasaki to Shanghai. He had, in his peregrinations through Japan, run his intense Americanism plumb against an English tea. Somehow, when "Missouri" and an English tea collided the tea got spilt—as "Missouri" told me the tale en route from Nagasaki to Shanghai the tea took second honors.
Arriving in Shanghai, "Missouri" went his way on business bent, while I looked up Dr. "John Blank," only to find that this busy man was out of town, and I regretted that I should have to disappoint our mutual friend and not be able to deliver his regards to Dr. "Blank." And I took a railroad trip to Pekin.
While I have come to China several times, until this trip I had never ridden a mile on a railroad in China, nor had I been north of Shanghai, and I was full of curiosity to see what I should see on a thousand-mile ride through China with its teeming millions.
At eleven P. M. of a sweltering night I found myself ensconced in a very comfortable sleeping car, composed of commodious staterooms of four berths each, two upper and two lower, and as the only traveling companion to share my stateroom, a young German of twenty-six years.
He was a keen young chap who had right ideas of life. Dropped in Shanghai four years ago, with an expired term in the German navy and fifty Mexican dollars in his pocket, bare-handed and alone, he had hit the Orient with such sturdy resolution and solid German sense that he had, in four short years, added to the fifty Mex. a young Urasian wife, half German and half Chinese (he assured me she was the dearest, sweetest little thing), a baby, and nine thousand good hard Mexican dollars in the bank.
A feat like that is worth mentioning—when you know the Orient—they don't all do so well, even with pull and influence to help.
It's good to have a chap like that, a right-principled, wholesome chap, who can speak your tongue and Chinese as well, in the berth across from you on a lonesome thousand-mile trip through China. A night's run and Nankin is reached at seven A. M. with a three hours' wait for breakfast, and to ferry across the Yangtze to Pukow to connect, at ten A. M., with the Pukow-Tientsin road—then settling down in a comfortable train, carrying a good restaurant car, for a ride of thirty hours without change of cars until we should reach Tientsin.