Seeing no official, then, I presumed I was their man. Whilst I fed
slowly on my rice and cabbage in a small earth-floor room, with my nose
as near as convenient to my oil lamp to get a little warmth, the
discomfort of Chinese life was forced upon me, and I imagined I was
having a good time. I was the best off in the inn by far; the others
must have been colder, certainly had worse food to eat, and yet to me it
was all the height of utmost cheerlessness.
From a hamlet opposite the town, where I sat down by the fire
exhausted in an old woman's shaky dwelling, and fed on aged
sardines and hot rice (atrocious mixture), there is a plain extending
for twenty li to Yuen-nan-i--flat as country in the Fen district. The
road was good (in wet weather, however, it must be terrible), and I
would drive a motor-car across, were it not for the 15-in. ruts which
disfigure the surface. And I know a man who would do this even, despite
the ruts: he takes a delight in running over dogs and small boys,
damaging rickshaws, bumping into bullock-carts, and so on--he would
have done it with liveliest freedom.
But what poverty there was! What women! What Children! With barely an
exception, the women had faces ground by want and bare necessity, in
which every cheerful and sympathetic lineament had been effaced by
life-long slavery and misery.
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