It is a creditable trapeze act to effect a mount after
the pony is ready for the journey. He had, he said, met me before. He
knew that I was a missionary, and had heard me preach. He remembered my
wife and myself and children passing the night in the same inn in which
he stayed on one of his pilgrimages from his native town somewhere to
the east of the province. I had never seen him before! I had no wife; I
have never preached a sermon in my life. I should be pained ever again
to have to suffer his unmannerly presence anywhere.
Ponies were being loaded near my table. The rapscallion in question
explained that the black blocks were salt, taking a pinch from my
salt-cellar with his grimy fingers to add point to his remarks. I kicked
at a couple of mongrels under the rude form on which I sat--they fought
for the skins of those potato-like pears which grow here so
prolifically. The person announced that they were dogs, and that an
idiosyncrasy of Chinese dogs was to fight. Several wags joined in, and
all appeared, through the traveling nincompoop, to know all about my
past and present, lapsing into a desultory harangue upon all men and
things foreign. The street reminded me of Clovelly--rugged and
ragged--and the people were wrinkled and wretched; and, indeed, being a
Devonian myself by birth, I should be excused of wantonly intending to
hurt the delicate feelings of the lusty sons of Devon were I to declare
that I thought the life not of a very terrible dissimilarity from that
port of antiquity in the West.
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