China has appealed to Christendom for the third time. May it not be in vain! Of all means for helping her, the Society for the Diffusion of Christian and General Knowledge seems the most useful at the present juncture, and £20 would bring a new city under its influence, while £200 would enable this Society to permeate a whole new province with its revivifying literature.
CHAPTER XIII.
UP-COUNTRY SHOPPING AND UP-COUNTRY WAYS.
Buying Curios.—Being stoned.—Chinese New Year.—Robbers.—Protesting Innocence.—Doing Penance.—Medicines.
Before Chinese New Year bargains are to be picked up—in Shanghai lovely embroidered satins, exquisite transparent tortoiseshell boxes, or china of the Ming period. Up-country our buyings are of a different order—a tiger-skin thirteen feet from head to tail, with grand markings, though of course not so thick a fur as is to be had at Newchwang. Head and tail and claws are all intact; and the man who brings it exhibits also its terrible jaws, and points to the holes where the spear entered before the man conquered the tiger. We have besides stone slabs, with the shells of the orthoceras embedded in them, sawn asunder and polished for screens or table-tops. What that most remarkable animal did, with a shell like the horn of an unicorn, not uncommonly over two feet long, and beautifully convoluted, it is hard to think. These pagoda-stones, as they are called, arrive in mass, all to realise money for New Year's debts.
Rocks of various kinds are the special product of the Ichang district, where we could supply all the rockeries of Shanghai with disintegrated conglomerate. Only, unfortunately, at this season fern-stones are not in sufficient beauty to play the part of the Irish pig, and help to pay the rent. But one day an eagle was shown into the drawing-room in splendid condition, with grand yellow beak, and beautiful brown eyes, and neck of blended tints of brown and bronze. The poor creature's feet were tightly tied together; but even as it was, we were careful about admiring its beauties too closely. Eight hundred cash was all that was even asked by its captor, who eventually is said to have parted with the beautiful bird for five hundred cash, or one shilling.
A curious little animal with beautiful long-nailed feet and tiny tail, and a fur so exquisitely thick and soft and feathery one quite longed for a collar of it, had not such luck as the eagle, and died before arriving here; but of these various luxuries—for none of these can quite be reckoned among the necessaries of life—it is a little difficult to choose on which to spend one's spare cash. The fur-shops close before the New Year, which is the more to be regretted as they offer the most fascinating footstool covers—intended for the seats of roomy Chinese chairs—made out of two heads of what are called seven-months' tigers, a thick fur of drab colour with an admixture of rich brown.
PUNCH AND JUDY.
Lent by Scotch Presbyterian Mission.
Oranges are what colour the scene,—mandarin oranges, of delicious flavour and thinnest possible skin; and other oranges, slightly indented at either end, and of a flavour peculiar to the district, and highly appreciated. But an attempt to examine the orange-market soon roused a row, when mud and brickbats flew through the air, so well hurled by some of the Hunan boatmen as to raise a lump like an egg on the skull of one of the party before we fairly got away, with our hats knocked over our eyes, and generally somewhat soiled. This stoning experience becomes a little monotonous. I have had hot things thrown at me in Hankow, hot things and stones in Itu, bricks and earth in Ichang, and since then so many things in so many less well-known places. There is a certain amount of excitement attached to it at first; but the most passionate lover of excitement could buy it more pleasurably otherwise. The people you look at always run away, if you look firmly enough; but then those from behind come on, and the men on the outskirts of the throng take the opportunity to throw things under cover of the others. After all, the shrieking and shouting they keep up is about the worst part of the proceeding, making one feel like a mad dog. And to walk through the narrow streets of a Chinese town in that character is not the pleasantest possible experience. We enjoyed it to perfection at Itu, where the people consider they have conquered the English; for a missionary, having taken a house there, was not only persuaded by the British Consul into giving up the house, the owner of which had as usual in such cases been thrown into prison, but had even to pay something himself, instead of having compensation given to him.