He must make it, he said, wide enough at the bottom for a man—or woman, they are the greatest offenders—to turn round if he flung himself in. He might change his mind and want to get out again, and if a body were found in a well not roomy enough to allow of this change of mind, he, the builder, would be tried for murder.
This thoughtful consideration for the would-be suicide, who might wish to repent, is truly Chinese. Personally I doubt very much whether anyone would take the trouble to investigate the bottom of a well. There might easily be something very much worse than Aunt Eliza in it. Presumably she was a well-to-do, and therefore a clean old lady, while the frequenters of those yards were beyond description.
The people in the little towns, and more especially those in the lonely farm-houses which looked so neat and well-kept in contrast with the ragged, dirty objects that came out of them, kept a most handsome breed of dogs. Sometimes they were black and white, or grey, but more often they were a beautiful tawny colour. They were, apparently, of the same breed as the wonks that infest all Chinese towns, but there was the same difference between these dogs and the wonks as there is between a miserable, mangy mongrel and the pampered beast that takes first prize at a great show. Indeed, I should like to see these great mountain dogs at a show, I imagine they would be hard to beat. They looked very fierce, whether they are or not I don't know, because I always gave them a wide berth, and Tuan, the cautious, always shook his head when one came too close, called to someone else with a stick to drive it away, and murmured his usual formula: “Must take care.” They told me there were wolves among these mountains, and I can quite believe it, though I never saw one. In the dead of winter they are fierce and dangerous, and much dreaded. They come into the villages, steal the helpless children, will make a snap at a man in passing and inflict terrible wounds. A Chinaman will go to sleep in all sorts of uncomfortable spots, and more than one has been wakened by having half the side of his face torn away. Of such a wound as this the man generally dies, but so many are seen who have so suffered, and gruesome sights they are, that the wolves must be fairly numerous and exceedingly bold. They take the children, too, long before the winter has come upon the land. There was a well-loved child, most precious, the only son of the only son, and his parents and grandparents being busy harvesting they left him at home playing happily about the threshold. When they came back, after a short absence, they found he had been so terribly mauled by a wolf that shortly after he died, and the home was desolate. And yet these wolves are very difficult to shoot.
“I have never seen one,” a man told me. “Again and again, when I was in the mountains, the villagers would come complaining of the depredations of a wolf. I could see for myself the results of his visit, but never, never have I found the wolf. It seems as if they must smell a gun.”
When first I heard of the wolves I laughed. I was so sure no beast of prey could live alongside a Chinaman, the Chinaman would want to eat him.
“They would if they could catch him,” said my friend, “but they can't, though the majority of the population are on the look-out for him. There is nothing of the hunter about the Chinaman.”
“Meat!” said a wretched farmer once, rubbing his stomach, when the missionaries fed him during a famine. He couldn't remember when he had tasted meat, and not in his most prosperous year had he had such a feast as his saviours had given him then.
“How much do you make a year?” asked the missionary.
He thought a little and then he said that, in a good year, he perhaps made twelve dollars, but then, of course, all years were not good years. But we, on our part, must remember that these people belong to another age, and that the purchasing power of the dollar for their wants is greater than it is with us.
Very, very lonely it seems to me must these mountain villages be when the frost of winter holds the hills in its grip, very shut out from the world were they now in the early summer, and very little could they know of the life that goes on within the Wall, let alone in other lands. Indeed there are no other lands for the Chinese of this class, this is his country, and this suffices for him, everybody else is in outer barbarism.