"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.
FORE:Alice did not pursue the subject, and since there was now no chance of Mr Silverdales coming in again, she put on her spectacles, which enabled her to see the lines of the pomegranate foliage with far greater distinctness. Never before had she had so vivid an interest in life as during these last two months; indeed the greater part of the female section of the congregation at St Thomass had experienced a similar quickening of their emotions, and a livelier iris burnished up the doves of the villas in Alfred Road. The iris in question, of course, was the effect of the personality of Cuthbert Silverdale, and if he was not, as he averred, being spoiled, the blame did not lie with his parishioners. They had discovered, as he no doubt meant them to do, that a soldier-saint had come among them, a missioner, a crusader, and they vied with each other in adoring and decorative obedience, making banners and embroideries for his church (for he allowed neither slippers nor neckties for himself) and in flocking to his discourses, and working under his guidance in the parish. There had been frantic discussions and quarrels over rites and doctrines; households had{107} been divided among themselves, and, as at The Cedars, sections of families had left St Thomass altogether and attached themselves to places of simpler ceremonial. The Bishop had been appealed to on the subject of lights, with the effect that the halo of a martyr had encircled Mr Silverdales head, without any of the inconveniences that generally attach to martyrdom, since the Bishop had not felt himself called upon to take any steps in the matter. Even a protesting round-robin, rather sparsely attested, had been sent him, in counterblast to which Alice Keeling with other enthusiastic young ladies had forwarded within a couple of days a far more voluminously signed document, quoting the prayer-book of Edward VI. in support of their pastor, according to their pastors interpretation of it at his Wednesday lectures on the history of the English Church.
FORE:Have you them ready for me now? he asked, keeping the farce up.Oh, I would rather not do that, said Norah. I have got great big overshoes: there they are filling up the corner of the room; I shant mind the snow. And, Mr Keeling, go back to the drawing-room, and say Ive gone.
ONE:The boys were not inclined to stay long in the cave, as the sound of the waters beating in at the entrance was almost deafening. They very soon sought the open air, where a new entertainment awaited them. There was a group of men and boys on the rocks at the entrance of the[Pg 180] cavern, and they called to the strangers to throw coins into the water and see how soon they could be recovered by diving. Frank threw a small piece of silver into the clear water of the Pacific, and in an instant half a dozen boys sprang for it. One of them caught it before it reached the bottom, and came up with the piece in his mouth. Several coins were thrown, with a similar result; and finally it was proposed to let the money reach the bottom before the divers started. This was done, and, as the depth was about twelve feet, the work of finding the bit of silver was not very easy. But it was found and brought to the surface; and after the divers had been complimented on their skill, our friends moved on. It is hardly necessary to add that the money thrown into the water became the property of the youth who secured it; though it was rumored that the divers were associated, and everything obtained went into a common purse. The Oriental people are famous for their guilds, or labor and trade associations, and nearly every occupation in life is under the control of a guild, which has very arbitrary rules. It is not at all impossible that the boys who dive for small coins at Enoshima are under the control of an association, and that its rules and regulations may have been in force for hundreds of years."Oh, no, indeed! I am the one to blame, the only one. If you had not, both of you, been so blameless--so splendidly blameless--I should hardly have let myself sink so deep into blame; but I knew you would never take the last glad step until you had seen the last sad proof that you might take it. Oh, Captain, to-night is the third time that in my dreams I have seen that man alive."
TWO:[Pg 48]
THREE:"I don't know." The thin voice sounded like someone shouting in the distance. "How should I know? It's all so difficult. But don't make it more difficult than you can help. Keep smilinglaughtersuch a jolly little world."
FORE:It was quite silent upstairs; there was no sign of a maid anywhere. As Hetty reached the landing the frightened bleating cry broke out again. There was only a night-light in the nursery; a little white figure sat moaning in bed.
Those evenings spent at Mr Keelings house had a great attraction for her. She enjoyed the work itself, and as she made her slips she had refreshing glances at the books. It was a leisurely performance, not like her swift work in the office. Charles helped her in it, making author-slips or illustration-slips as she made title-slips. There was a fire on the hearth, a tray of sandwiches for them before they left, and more often than not Mr Keeling came and sat with them for half an hour, unpacking fresh volumes if any had come in, and looking through the book-catalogues that were sent him. And Norah was honest enough with herself to confess that it was not the work alone that interested her. Friendship, no less than friendship sudden and to her quite unexpected, had been the flower of the original enmity between{130} her and the man, who was never sir to her even in the office now. It dated from the moment when he had made his unreserved apology to her over the matter of the book-plates. She knew what it must cost to a man of his type to say what he had said to his typewriter, and she had to revise all her previous estimates of him, and add him up honestly again. She found the total a very different one from that which she had supposed was correct. True, a woman does not like or dislike a man directly because of his qualities, but his qualities are the soil from which her like or dislike springs. They are part at any rate of his personality, in which she finds charm or repulsiveness. The upshot was, to take it at its smallest measure, that instead of disliking her work for him, she had grown to like it, because it was for him that she did it."As to that," said Doctor Bronson, "much depends upon what you would call frequent. In former times a man might lose his head for a very slight reason, or, perhaps, no reason at all. Crimes that we would consider of small degree were punished with death, and there was very little time wasted between the sentence and its execution. As the Japanese have become more and more familiar with the customs of Western nations, they have learned that we do not remove the heads of our people for trifles, and they show their good sense by following our example. Of late years, executions by decapitation are much less frequent than formerly, but even now there are more of them than there need be.
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