their debts, clean house eiglentlie But once a year they all pay ablute furiously, and then, clad in their best silk robes, they feast, chin-chin their ancestors and their relatives, corner the entire crop of hire autos and dash round the city ina long delirious joy ride to the accompaniment of firecrackers and gongs.
All your chits come home to roost so as to help your Chinese creditors Square up their own obligations; every servant and all the tradespeople expect large cumshas; and up to New Year's eve the Chinese section is as busy as the postman the day before Christmas. After that the shutters of the shops are put up and from behind them comes the clanging of gongs and the click of ivory counters. The longer a merchant can keep his shutters up, the larger his financial prestige. told our taipan. I thought we should close for at least a week just to save our face, but I couldn't get holiday. anything more than the three days'
A Hunprep Years ix Two Hours.
That was enough, however, to give Madge and me a chance to explore the interior, and in we plunged as far as Soochow, about an hour and a half out of Shanghai by my watch and a hundred years away by my feelings.
I wanted to see how the Chinese travel, so I dragged Madge into the second class car for while. Talk about the wild joys of eating. I never saw more food tucked away at a newsboys' dinner than' disappeared during the first ten miles. An indispensable accompaniment of a trip seems to be a huge lunch basket with as many layers as a prize cake at the Woman's Exchange. Moreover these hearty feeders order all kinds of specials from the dining car, and lest there should be a moment's famine every now and then their servants tote in reinforcements of eatables from the third class car, or when the car stops the feast is replenished from the station vendors.
When we got to Soochow I was almost disappointed to see such a
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.