ONE:"Canton is the capital of the province of Kwang-tung, and its name in English is a corruption of the Chinese one. The people who live there call it 'Kwang-tung-sang-shing,' and the Portuguese call it Kam-tom, and they write it that way. It is called the City of Rams, just as Florence is called the Beautiful City, and Genoa the Haughty; and the Chinese who live there are very proud of it. The climate is warm, the thermometer rising to 85° or 90° in the summer, and rarely going below 50° in winter. Occasionally ice forms to the thickness of heavy paper, and once in five or ten years there will be a slight fall of snow, which astonishes all the children, and many of the older people.I couldnt eat a morsel, she said, though I know it is the duty of all of us to keep our strength up. There is hare soup too: he was so fond of hare soup. But I must run upstairs first, and put on a black fichu or something. I could not sit down to table without some little token of respect like that.
TWO:"Verbal message? No, Lieutenant, she didn't--oh!--from the General! Yes! the General says--'Rodney.'"{132}
ONE:"The bamboo," said the Doctor, "is of use from a very early age. The young shoots are boiled and eaten, or soaked in sugar, and preserved as confectionery. The roots of the plant are carved so as to resemble animals or men, and in this shape are used as ornaments; and when the bamboo is matured, and of full size, it is turned to purposes almost without number. The hollow stalks are used as water-pipes; rafts are made of them; the walls and roofs of houses are constructed from them; and they serve for the masts of smaller boats and the yards of larger ones. The light and strong poles which the coolies place over their shoulders for bearing burdens are almost invariably of bamboo; and where it grows abundantly it is used for making fences and sheds, and for the construction of nearly every implement of agriculture. Its fibres are twisted into rope, or softened into pulp for paper; every article of furniture is made of bamboo, and so are hats, umbrellas, fans, cups, and a thousand other things. In fact, it would be easier to say what is not made of it in these Eastern countries than to say what is; and an attempt at a mere enumeration of its uses and the articles made from it would be tedious. Take away the bamboo from the people of Japan and China, and you would deprive them of their principal means of support, or, at any rate, would make life a much greater burden than it now is."
TWO:
ONE:"Why," said I, "as to that, Lieutenant Ferry believes there's something right about everything that's beautiful, and something wrong about everything that isn't. Now, of course that's a very dangerous idea, and yet--" So I went on; ah me! the nightmare of it hangs over me yet, "religionist" though I am, after a fashion, unto this day. In Ferry's defence I maintained that only so much of any man's religion as fitted him, and fitted him not as his saddle or his clothes, but as his nervous system fitted him, was really his, or was really religion. I said I knew a man whose ready-made religion, small as it was, bagged all over him and made him as grotesque as a child in his father's trousers. The chaplain tittered so approvingly that I straightened to spout again, but just then we saw three distant figures that I knew at a glance.
TWO:"I see; I see; you mean my mother!"
