“No,” laughed Bert, “if the ‘Gray Ghost’ tried to get through here, it would carry away part of the houses on each side of the street. The worst thing that can run over us here is a wheelbarrow.”
“Or a sedan chair,” added Tom, as one of these, bearing a passenger, carried by four stalwart coolies, brushed against him.
A constant din filled the air as customers bargained with the shop-keepers over the really beautiful wares displayed on every hand. Rare silks and ivories and lacquered objects were heaped in rich profusion in the front of the narrow stalls, and their evident value stood out in marked contrast to the squalid surroundings that served as a setting.
“No ‘one price’ here, I imagine,” said Ralph, as the boys watched the noisy disputes between buyer and seller.
“No,” said Bert. “To use a phrase that our financiers in America are fond of, they put on ‘all that the traffic will bear.’ I suppose if you actually gave them what they first asked they’d throw a fit or drop dead. I’d hate to take the chance.”
“It would be an awful loss, wouldn’t it?” asked Tom sarcastically, as he looked about at the immense crowd swarming like bees from a hive. “Where could they find anyone to take his place?”
“There are quite a few, aren’t there?” said Ralph. “The mystery is where they all live and sleep. There don’t seem to be enough houses in the town to take care of them all.”
“No,” remarked Bert, “but what the town lacks in the way of accommodations is supplied by the river. Millions of the Chinese live in the boats along the rivers, and at night you can see them pouring down to the waterside in droves. A white man needs a space six feet by two when he’s dead, but a Chinaman doesn’t need much more than that while he is alive. A sardine has nothing on him when it comes to saving space and packing close.”
At every turn their eyes were greeted with something new and strange. Here a wandering barber squatted in the street and carried on his trade as calmly as though in a shop of his own. Tinkers mended pans, soothsayers told fortunes, jugglers and acrobats held forth to delighted crowds, snake charmers put their slimy pets through a bewildering variety of exhibitions. Groups of idlers played fan-tan and other games of chance, and through the waving curtains of queerly painted booths came at times the acrid fumes of opium. Mingled with these were the odors of cooking, some repellant and some appetizing, which latter reminded the boys that it was getting toward noon and their healthy appetites began to assert themselves. They looked at each other.