“Now do you go on to the next chapter?” said I.
“No. Arx-play-in,” said the brightest of the boys. “You arx-play-in what we rade to you.”
I wished the floor of that Sunday-school chapel would open and swallow me up. To expound the fifteenth of Matthew at all; above all, to expound it in English which those poor souls could understand! In despair I glanced at the clock: it lacked thirty minutes of the end of school; at the other teachers: they were all glibly responding. Guiltily I said, “Very well. Begin and read the chapter over again, very slowly; and when you come to any word you do not understand, tell me, and I will try to explain it to you.”
Their countenances fell. This was not the way they had usually been taught. But with the meekness of a down-trodden people they obeyed. It worked even better than I had hoped. Poor souls! they probably did not understand enough to select the words which perplexed them. They trudged patiently through their verses again without question. But my Charybdis was near. The sixth verse came to the brightest boy. As he read, “Thus have ye made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition,” he paused after the word tradition. I trembled.
“Arx-play-in trardition,” he said.
“What?” said I, feebly, to gain a second’s more of time. “What word did you say?”
“Trardition,” he persisted. “What are trardition? Arx-play-in.”
What I said I do not know. Probably I should not tell if I did. But I am very sure that never in all my life have I found myself, and never in all the rest of my life shall I find myself, in so utterly desperate a dilemma as I was then, with those patient, earnest, oblique eyes fixed on me, and the gentle Chinese voice reiterating, “What are trardition?”