The same narrow lanes succeed each other, and the conviction
is gradually impressed upon the mind that such is the general trend of
the character of the city and its people. There were the same busy
mechanics, barbers, traders, wayside cooks, traveling fortune-tellers,
and lusty coolies; the wag doctor, the bane of the gullible, was there
to drive his iniquitous living; now and then the scene's monotony was
disturbed by the presence of the chair and the retinue of a city
mandarin. Yet with all the hurry and din, the hurrying and the scurrying
in doing and driving for making money, seldom was there an accident or
interruption of good nature. There was the same romance in the streets
that one reads of at school--so much alike and yet so different from
what one meets in the Chinese places at the coast or in Hong-Kong or
Singapore. In Sui-fu, more than in any other town in Western China which
I visited, had the native artist seemed to have lavished his ingenuity
on the street signboards. Their caligraphy gave the most humorous
intimation of the superiority of the wares on sale; many of them
contained some fictitious emblem, adopted as the name of the shop,
similar to the practice adopted in London two centuries ago, and so
common now in the Straits Settlements, where bankrupts are allowed
considerable more freedom than would be possible if fictitious
registration were not allowed.
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