That was puzzling.  Did not these natives of Tahiti themselves wear little clothing?  Who were they to object to a white man doffing the superfluities of dress in a climate where breadfruit and bananas grow?  Or the French, the governors of Tahiti?  Were they, in that isle so distant from Paris, their capital, practising a puritanism unknown at home?  Was nature so fearful?  The figure of the barefooted man often arose as I watched the Farallones disappear, the last of land we would see until we arrived at Tahiti, nearly two weeks later.

The days fell away from the calendar; they obliterated themselves as quietly as our ship’s wake to the north, as we planed over the smooth waters toward the equator.  Gradually the passengers took on character, and out of the first welter of contacts came those definite impressions which are almost always right and which, though we modify them or reverse them by acquaintance, we return to finally.

There was a Chinese, the strangest figure of an Asiatic, with a thin mustache, and wearing always a black frock-coat and trousers, elastic gaiters, and a stiff, black hat.  His face was long and oval and the color of old ivory.  He had tried to gain admission to Australia and New Zealand, and then the United States, and had been excluded under some harsh laws.  He was plainly a scholar, but had brought with him from China a store of curios, probably to enable him to earn money in the land of the white.  Australia had refused him; he had been shut out of San Francisco, and the very steamship that brought him was compelled to take him away.  He had failed to bring a necessary certificate, or something of the sort, and the inexorable laws of three Christian countries had sent him wandering, so that it was inevitable he must return to China by the route he had 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 recalled 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 highest, 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.