8 MYSTIC ISLES 



come. He was the most mournful of sights, sitting 

 most of the day in a retired spot, brooding, apparently 

 over his fate. He never smiled, though I who have 

 been much in China, tried to stir him from his sadness 

 by exclamations and gestures. His race has a very 

 keen sense of humor. They see a thousand funny 

 things about them, and laugh inwardly; but they never 

 see anything amusing in themselves. The individual 

 man conceives himself a dignified figure in a world of 

 burlesque. 



This man's face was rid of any self-pity. I think he 

 was stunned by the horror of the thing, that he, a man 

 of Chinese letters, who had departed from the centuried 

 custom of his pundit caste of remaining in their own 

 country, who had left his family or clan to increase his 

 store of lesser knowledge, should be denied the door by 

 these inferior nations of the West. He might have re- 

 called Chien Lung, a Manchu emperor, who, when 

 apologized to in writing by a Dutch governor of Batavia 

 who had murdered almost all the Chinese there, replied 

 that China had no interest in wretches who had left 

 their native land. A thousand years ago the Chinese 

 put the soldier lowest in the scale and the scholar high- 

 est, with the man of business as of no importance. And 

 yet these commercial peoples barred their gates to him! 

 For a number of days he took his place in the shade of 

 a davited boat, and now and again he read from a quaint 

 book the Analects of Confucius. 



We sailed on Wednesday, and on Sunday made the 

 first tropic, nearly twenty-three and a half degrees 

 above the line. No rough weather or unkindly wind 

 had disturbed us from the hour we had left the "too 



