and utterly unimpressed by anything but the purely business concerns of those he served.  Domestic secrets were safe with him; his indifference to your thoughts, actions, and feelings had all the contempt which his three thousand years of history and his innate belief in your inferiority seemed to justify.  He was blind and deaf in your household because you didn’t interest him in the least.  It was said that a gentleman, who wished to test his impassiveness, arranged with his wife to come home one day and, in the hearing of his Chinese waiter who was more than usually intelligent—­to disclose with well-simulated emotion the details of a murder he had just committed.  He did so.  The Chinaman heard it without a sign of horror or attention even to the lifting of an eyelid, but continued his duties unconcerned.  Unfortunately, the gentleman, in order to increase the horror of the situation, added that now there was nothing left for him but to cut his throat.  At this John quietly left the room.  The gentleman was delighted at the success of his ruse until the door reopened and John reappeared with his master’s razor, which he quietly slipped—­as if it had been a forgotten fork—­beside his master’s plate, and calmly resumed his serving.  I have always considered this story to be quite as improbable as it was inartistic, from its tacit admission of a certain interest on the part of the Chinaman.  I never knew one who would have been sufficiently concerned to go for the razor.

His taciturnity and reticence may have been confounded with rudeness of address, although he was always civil enough.  “I see you have listened to me and done exactly what I told you,” said a lady, commending some performance of her servant after a previous lengthy lecture; “that’s very nice.”  “Yes,” said John calmly, “you talkee allee time; talkee allee too much.”  “I always find Ling very polite,” said another lady, speaking of her cook, “but I wish he did not always say to me, ‘Goodnight, John,’ in a high falsetto voice.”  She had not recognized the fact that he was simply repeating her own salutation with his marvelous instinct of relentless imitation, even as to voice.  I hesitate to record the endless stories of his misapplication of that faculty which were then current, from the one of the laundryman who removed the buttons from the shirts that were sent to him to wash that they might agree with the condition of the one offered him as a pattern for “doing up,” to that of the unfortunate employer who, while showing John how to handle valuable china carefully, had the misfortune to drop a plate himself—­an accident which was followed by the prompt breaking of another by the neophyte, with the addition of “Oh, hellee!” in humble imitation of his master.