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» •wiMMHM<i«MMiHlMlllM»iH«laMM^ THJiGHARM OF THF MIDDLE RlMGDOn JAMES I^EIDM/\RSH vvT-rrr»tT** • f »f ?f I' f* »T***V >«..•>•««••»•»«>»« •^'~» - > ry it * t » t. > » » j ^ Dfl "7 Class -^^ ^ Konlc t M ? G Copiglit]^?. CDEOUGHT DEPOSIT. THE CHARN OF THE KIDDLE KINGDOM "A, Lord!" thought I, "that madest us. Yet saw I never swich noblesse Of ymages, ne swich richesse, . But not woot I who dide hem wirche, Ner wher I am, ne in what contree. But now wol I go out and see. Right at the wyket, yif I can See o-wher any steryng man. That may me telle wher I am." Chaucer's House of Fame. '% K.- PAGODA IN WESTERN HILLS, PEKING Frontispiece .rTIi, /('. :;ll!i;s ::i •l;i|;'-| rnmm !iSr!|||l'""inn ,>> M4m ' llllllllllllnllillniliiiiLlilillliiilliiiliiiliiiiu^^^^^ liillliiiliiiiiiii A I •I- THE CHARN A OF THE A KIDDLE KINGDOM JAMES REID MARSH WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BOSTON UTT3.E, BJ^.OWjN, AND COMPANY 19 2 2 kJ\ |„jl ,,||,r'" ll,„,.l |l .,,|,r ,,!,. '.lif. ^Sif Copyright, 1922, Bt Little, Bkown, and Company. All rights reserved Published September, 19«2 OCT -4 '22 ©CU68605'^ TO Jeannette Philups Gibbs AND Abthur Hamilton Gibbs without whose friendly counsel and encouragement this book would probably not have been undertaken. FOREWORD The lady was wearing a scarlet skirt with a very long coat of the same material when the boy first saw her. She was standing on the brink of the Grand Canon, watching the sun splash the stone battleship with every con- ceivable color, but mostly red, a hue only less brilliant than her skirt. The boy was on the brink of the Canon, too. He was prone on his stomach, dipping his head into nearly im- measurable depths, for he had just loosened a rock from the shelving where he lay, and was watching it fall, and afterwards, when it had merged with the reddish brown of the land- scape, listening for its impingement on the cliffs below. Finally, after his experiment, for it was an experiment and reminiscent of the days when he had wrestled with the vagaries of falling bodies, the boy stood up, his face aglow with ap- preciation of the rich panorama that stretched before him. He was standing perilously near the edge of the world, for that was what it amounted to. He could not have taken a vii " FOREWORD fraction of a step without being savagely hurtled into space. And this it was that constrained the lady to speak to him. She had been waiting some moments, as if for him to turn of his own accord, for she was afraid of startling him with a word. Just as the boy turned she said, "The days of fairies are past, you know. It has happened before,—shelves crumbling away, I mean. If you want to prolong your journey, you had better keep away from the edge of things." The boy turned quickly, startled at the sound of her voice, for he had had no intima- tion of her coming. He reddened under the directness of her gaze and after what seemed to him an infinity of silence answered, "I suppose it was foolish of me. And as for my journey, that has scarcely begun. "Then you are going far.^^" "Just underneath," he replied. And then he added, as if in extenuation of what he deemed a cryptic remark, "China. I started digging for it once, you know." Of course she did not know, but somehow he had felt immediately familiar with the lady. The boy could not understand why he should have felt this way; although the lady did. She had long cultivated the art of being familiar. viii FOREWORD "And you have decided to go round in- stead," she interpolated with a winning smile. "Yes," he answered. "You see a chum and I were only seven years old when we commenced digging, and I don't suppose we should have gotten farther down than a mile by now. The pit caved in on us one day, and that was the end of it. And now I am actually going there! It seems incredible." "Nor did I ever expect to," she countered, placing the top of her swagger stick between her pretty red lips and looking at him de- murely, with only the glimmer of a smile. "Then you have been to China!" the boy exclaimed with a kind of childish surprise. "Ummm," the lady replied, enjoying his consternation with every ounce of her feminine subtlety. "And I'm on my way back, too." "Then we shall travel together," the boy burst out with a frankness and spontaneity that were especially pleasing to the lady in scarlet. "That depends," she said, thrusting the swagger stick once more between her pretty red lips. "What boat are you taking.'^ Do you sail from Frisco?" "Yes, Frisco," he quickly replied, as if for that reason it must be by the identical steamer. ix FOREWORD "And the ship?" she asked, not a little impatiently. "Persia Maru," he replied, with his eyes fastened on hers. He must have been trying to divine the truth by the sober light that shone from them. Had he been a man and experienced in the ways of women he could have accomplished his task. It was scarcely necessary that the lady should speak. For the answer was written plainly on her face. In the end she laughed at the boy's confusion and said, "What wonderful luck!" "You have never been away from home before," she continued, rather than asked. "Oh, I have been on ships making voyages into the Caribbean," he answered carelessly. It was evident that he wanted to impress her, if he could, with his worldliness. But from the nature of her reply it was equally evident that he had failed to accomplish this very youngish desire. "I see I'll have to take you in hand," she said. "You can't go out there and break your legs like a colt that's put too early to pasture. Do you greatly mind if I try? I think I'll succeed. If there's a single word that comes to my mind more forcefully than any other it is tolerance. Be sure you understand before you condemn. Don't build your shell until " FOREWORD you are sure what you want it to be. The average man builds his about thirty. Most women's are built by nature. So there you are. I think we had better be getting back to the train. It leaves within the hour." The boy had an impulse to thank the lady for all she had said to him, but when he considered that perhaps she had a lot more to say, and that there was to be a sufficiency of time permitted them on the ocean journey, he only acquiesced. They walked side by side, hardly venturing to speak until they reached the veranda, when she turned to him, put out her hand, almost impulsively, or so it seemed to the boy, and said, "This has been an extremely pleasant afternoon. You see, I am a sports- woman and have a reputation for picking win- ners. Of course, even wins may be flukes, and I have learned not to stake my last penny on anything, no, not even on character. But that is neither here nor there. I'll see you on the train. Perhaps it's not being worth your while. Yes.f* Au revoir, then. The boy saw the lady on the train, but the talks they had there were not nearly so intimate as those that came later on the ship. Of course, there were a multitude of subjects on which the lady could only touch cursorily. xi " FOREWORD After all, one can't, to use her very words, anticipate experience. "I simply want you to have a healthy attitude of mind," she would say. "You remember the old Latin proverb, ^ Sequi na- turam.' But how few realize what an extremely difficult art it is to follow nature, as if one were natural by instinct! The animals may be, and man undoubtedly once was, but the farther he gets away from the ones who lived in trees the farther he gets from the truth of the flesh, which, after all, is not the truth of the spirit. They are separate, don't you see. The reason animals make such a success of life is because they haven't spirits. They can't mix their drinks, so to speak, and get intoxicated with themselves. But ever since the garden of Eden man has been mixing his drinks and woman's too, and a sorry mess he has made of them! The summum honum of all my advice becomes, don't mix your drinks. You don't understand, do you? But you will some day. Never fear, you will. The steamer had dropped anchor off Woo- sung, which is the place where the Yangtze widens one of its mouths before embrowning the sea. It was in the smaller hours of the morning and a big tender came down the river to take those disembarking at Shanghai to the xii FOREWORD jetty. The boy wanted to bid the lady good- by, but in the confusion of taking off baggage he had completely lost trace of her. He distinctly remembers standing near the after hatch of the tender watching the multi- tudinous lights of the liner blur into a nearly indistinguishable whole. Then he heard a big man grunt contemptuously. He looked down into the hatch, and there on a pile of tumbled mattresses he saw the lady in scarlet peacefully sleeping.

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