"Forget it, 'Missouri.' Let's take a wheelbarrow ride and you can use my Kioto experience when you get home—just tell it to your good people as if it had happened to you. Or, if you have time when you get to Canton, go and call on my friend S——.
"He is a missionary. I won't let him know that you are coming to see him, and I won't give you a letter of introduction to him—you won't need a letter.
"Go at him just as you did at your 'two-spot'—you won't fool him—he'll see back of it. You wouldn't have fooled me in Yokohama if you'd declaimed it instead of writing it to me. You're something of a josher, 'Missouri,' but you don't exactly impress even the ordinary run as a gleaner of your views from bar-room associates.
As we jounced along over the bridge in front of our hotel on a Shanghai wheelbarrow
"S—— would have made a whale of a business man if he hadn't given his life to missions. He's a whale of a business man as it is. I misjudge him, and I misjudge you, if he don't work you for a contribution to foreign missions that will make the Board in New York throw up their hats when they hear of it, and show you a story to take back home that will make the tight-wads in your community loosen up when the hat is passed around for foreign missions."
As we jounced along over the bridge in front of our hotel and along the bund on a Shanghai wheelbarrow, passing mixed cargoes of merchandise and passengers on those same homely vehicles, and as I explained to "Missouri" how those were only little loads, how up north they piled on more and more and then rigged them up with sails, the absolute ludicrousness of it all made "Missouri" forget his grouch, and he promised me that he'd try to look up S—— in Canton—and I thought I saw where Missouri mules might be hitched to Foreign Missions—and that's some motive power.
XV
A STO-O-RM AT SEA
Since starting my series of travel letters, word has come to me that some of my readers are disappointed that I shied at a description of seasickness—an eminently looked-for and expected dissertation—and instead went off on a tangent about false teeth, which was not in the regular line of letters of travel; and I also learn that the hope is entertained that I will not close this series without describing a storm at sea, the which is a regular, fit, and greatly-to-be-desired adjunct to such a series of letters as I am writing.