Near by a young girl gave suck to a deformed
infant, lucky to have survived its birth; her neck was as big as her
breasts--merely a case of goitre. Coolies passed, panting and puffing,
all casting a curious glance at him to whose beneficence all were
willing to pander.
At tiffin I counted thirty-three wretched people, who turned out to see
the barbarian. They desired, and desired importunately, to touch me and
the clothes which covered me. And I submitted.
This half-way place was interesting owing to the fact that the lady in
charge of the buffet could speak two words of French--she had, I
believe, acted as washerwoman to a man who at one time had been in the
Customs at Mengtsz. Great excitement ensued among the perspiring
laborers of the road and the dumb-struck yokels of the district. The
lady was so goitrous that it would have been extremely risky to hazard a
guess as to the exact spot where her face began or ended; and here, in a
place where with all her neighbors she had lived through a period noted
for famine, for rebellion, for wholesale death and murder of an entire
village, she endured such terrible poverty that one would have thought
her spirit would have waned and the light of her youth burned out.
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