Dear Kitty:—How travelling does expand the mind! Going to Soochow taught me that whole cities move rather than house clean so there's an idea I can use when this riotous collection of Chinese curios which I'm accumulating absolutely chokes my room.
It would appear that the original Soochow was built with eight water gates, like heaven (which is more novel information) and square like the earth. Even those ambitious plans couldn't keep out undesirables like agitators, assassins and thieves so the good old stock just moved out and built a new city. Can you beat that for an. accommodating disposition? Soochow must have tried on new city walls just as an exacting belle tries on hats, but at last she found a style that fitted her complexion and looks as settled to-day as if she had never wavered.
Thanks to friend pidgin''! (which literally translated from pidgin English means working one's friends) we got the loan of a houseboat and friends of a friend took us down to see the far-famed Precious Girdle Bridge with no less than 53 arches to its credit. Soochow bridges are known all over China and no wonder, for certainly its builders had practice enough with all the intersecting canals.
Houseboats are another of the conveniences of the Orient which go far toward convincing mo that home was never like this. Inside a tiny cabin you have as many of the comforts of life as you'd find in one of owr apartment houses, your crew sleeps under the planks or over the edge—any way you never have to bother about servants' quarters, They will persist in growing garlic in the window boxes and keeping a string of tame ducks tethered in back, and I understand they converse with animation the long night through, but what are these drawbacks compared with seeing canal life in China?
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.