“You pity me,” said the mandarin.
“Pity you!” said the woman. “Ah! don’t you think the Emperor would send me in your place?”
The Chinaman laughed. “I am sure his Majesty would not care to give you so much hard work to do.”
“How do you get there, how are you going?” said Q., trying in a blind, groping way to turn the conversational tide.
“In my junk,” said Ja Hong Ting. “It is one of the biggest junks in China—a comfortable boat, quite like a floating home, as madame here would call it, and I always enjoy my sails over to Korea and back very much more than I enjoy my stay in Korea.”
“Will any of your ladies go with you?” asked Mrs. Q.
The mandarin laughed and shook his head. And then something seemed to occur to him. He put down the spoon that had been almost to his mouth, and after a moment’s pause, said, “I could take one or two of them. There’s room, and there’s comfort in the boat. Would you”—turning to Q.—“like to come and bring your wife?”
Q. groaned, and said hastily, “Thanks awfully, but I shall have to go to Calcutta next month.” But as he spoke he knew that he was like a drowning man catching at a straw. The mandarin’s suggestion was, of all suggestions in the world, the one to fire Mrs. Q.’s easily fired imagination.
And so it came about that a month or more afterwards Ja Hong Ting’s junk had pushed off from Shanghai with “us five in family,” as Mrs. Q. delightedly called the mandarin, his wife, and their three guests.
The West has conquered the East. Christianity has triumphed. Heathenism is mangled, and, let us hope, dying. Across the fair, flower-dimpled back of Asia we have laid the unpicturesque blessing of railroads, and thoroughly well-made, thoroughly well-kept paths for the men who consider life a succession of journeys, and the animals who enable such men to perpetually journey.