NOTES OF TRAVEL IN CHINA. 171 



Starved looking cats, whose melancholy mew betokens their impend- 

 ing fate, are carefully secured in cages, and puppies whose keepers 

 hold them up to the view, are ready for the dainty epicure. 

 Expatiating booksellers, apothecaries vending their drugs to their 

 hypocondriacal customers, and trained birds whose feats astonish the 

 rabble, fill up the interval. This confused mass must be buffetted 

 with, in attempting to pass through a street in Canton. 



Signs innummerable, projected from one to three feet from 

 the front of the houses, and suspended lengthwise, are adorned with 

 gaily painted characters, which tell the name of the merchant before 

 whose door they hang. The shops are rather dark inside, but many 

 of them are filled with an excellent assortment of silks, ivory wares, 

 Chinese devices, and foreign importations. The plausibility and 

 naivette of the merchants, and in fact of every Chinaman with whom 

 the stranger comes into contact, are very apt to achieve the pur- 

 pose for which they are assumed, unless he has been previously 

 fortified against them by one whose experience has been dearly pur- 

 chased, and who wishes to save a friend from the imposition which 

 would be practised upon him. They are an artful and untruthful 

 race, who by smiles and complimentary addresses invite the passing 

 stranger beneath their roof that they may rob him. They hesitate 

 not to tell an untruth, and blush not at being detected, and the old- 

 est foreign residents in China, freely say that the more respectable 

 the appearance of the man, or exalted his position among his fellow 

 men, the greater is the necessity for doubting his sincerity. No 

 moral principle regulates their action in life, interest alone compels 

 them to perform their agreements with the foreign residents, having 

 been taught that they will not be patronized unless they are upright 

 in their dealings with them. They ask the stranger five times as 

 much for an article as they would be ultimately willing to take 

 for it. 



The shopmen, and in fact, nearly all the tankia or boat people in 

 the neighborhood of the foreign gardens, speak a corruption of the 

 English language, commonly called ''pigeon English," pigeon being 

 the Chinese mode of pronouncing "business." 



This language has become a regular dialect, and when first heard 

 by the stranger it would appear as though the person speaking was 

 parading indiscriminately, a few English words before his hearer 

 whose duty it was to make a meaning out of them. A foreign resi- 

 dent will introduce a friend to a Chinese merchant as follows : " mi 

 chin-chin you, this one velly goodflin belong mi, mi wantchie you do 

 plopel pigeon along he all same fashion along mi — spose no do plopel 



