He insisted.  Smiling upon him with grave benignity, I said that I would take a smaller room, and gave orders to that effect to my man, adding that my whole sense of right and justice towards fellow-travelers revolted against such self-sacrifice on his part.  He still insisted.  Smiling again, this time the timid smile of the commoner looking up into the face of the great, I allowed myself reluctantly to be pushed bodily into the best apartment.

This was my intention from the first.  Although not too familiar with it, I allowed the Chinese to imagine that I was well grounded in the absurdities of his national etiquette; whilst he, observing, too, the outrageous routine of common politeness, probably went away swearing that he had been turned out.  He had cut off his nose to spite his face.

I cannot truthfully deny, however, that the fellow was very kind, but he would persist in the belief that it was an impossibility for me to tell the truth.  Later, pointing at me and eyeing me up and down as I shaved in the twilight, he sneered, “Engleeshman!  Engleeshman!” and scooting with an armful of clothing, small pots of eatables, official documents and other sundries, told me point-blank that he did not believe that such a noble person could not speak such a contemptible language as Chinese.

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.  In the bitter cold they, women and children, crouched round a scanty fir-wood firing, not enough even to keep alive their natural heat.  One long pitiful sight of thriftless poverty.

To Hungay was a fearful day.  Little to eat could I procure, and the cold gave me a lusty ox’s appetite.  To me a bellyful came as a windfall.