ONE:How many times, in the course of a lifetime, would he repeat that operation? And he would always stand in exactly the same way, with his legs straddled apart, and his elbows spanning out like flappers. He would always pass the razor over his face in a certain manner, avoiding those places where even the sharpest blade boggled a little, proceeding with the same mechanical strokes until the job was once more accomplished. Afterwards, he would laboriously separate the portions of his razor and wipe them methodically, always in the same order. That was because, once you had decided upon the right way to do a thing you adopted that method for good."I was fifteen years old when I pulled my first oar in a whale-boat; I was boat-steerer at eighteen, and second mate at twenty, and before I was twenty-one I had known what it was to be in the mouth of a sperm-whale. It is hardly necessary to say that I got out of it as fast as I could, and didn't stop to see if my hair was combed and my[Pg 62] shirt-collar buttoned. A man has no time to put on frills under such circumstances.
FORE:"But they were not made by the Japanese, as this one was," Frank responded, "and they are statues of figures standing erect, while this represents a sitting figure. A sitting figure sixty feet high is something you don't see every day.""I don't believe," said I, "I'd better put myself on the old gentleman when the mistress of the house is away."
FORE:"I told him I never had, and then he remarked that I was certain to be sea-sick, he could see it in my face. He said he was an old traveller, and rarely suffered, and then he gave me some advice as to what I should do when I began to feel badly. I thanked him and went on deck. "Kioto is famous in the rest of the world for its manufactures of porcelain of various kinds, and also for its bronzes and silk goods. There is a large trade in Kioto ware, and everybody says that it is increasing. At any rate, the prices they ask here are as high as in Yokohama for the same kind of articles, and some things are really dearer here than there. Some of the work in bronze is very fine, and I can tell you a funny story about the way the merchants prepare goods for the market. The incident happened yesterday, when we were in a shop with a gentleman from Kobe whom we had met at the hotel.
FORE:"You can hardly have dreamed of the beautiful things we found in Canton cut out of ivory. There were combs and brooches so delicate that it seemed as if they could be blown to pieces by a breath; and there were boxes and card-cases with representations of landscapes, and men and animals on them so small that we needed a microscope to see them distinctly. In one shop we saw the whole tusk of an elephant carved from one end to the other so closely that you could hardly put a pin on it without hitting some part of the work. They told us that the tusk had been sent there by the gentleman who killed the elephant in India, and he was having it carved to keep as a trophy. The carving had cost six hundred[Pg 419] dollars; and if it had been done in America, it would have cost nearer six thousand. Skilled labor is cheap in China, just as unskilled labor is, and it is astonishing for how little a man can be employed on the kind of work that would bring a high price in Europe or America.
