Page:"Round the world." - Letters from Japan, China, India, and Egypt (IA roundworldletter00fogg 0).pdf/110

 and calculating their distance so exactly, as usually to escape being run down. Sometimes, however, they are sunk and set up such exorbitant claims for the loss of their craft that they are accused of purposely causing their destruction.

Fifty miles up the Yangtse we turn to the left into the Woosung, a clear stream three quarters of a mile wide, upon which about twelve miles above its confluence with the Yangtse is built the city of Shanghai, the great foreign commercial mart of Northern China. The name suggests to us all that great, coarse, overgrown chicken, which (the word not the fowl) was in everybody's mouth while the “hen fever” raged. It is unfortunate that so fine a city should be associated in our minds with so awkward a bird. As we approach it from the water the magnificent buildings occupied by the merchants, which face the bund or prays, a wide avenue along the river, give it a very imposing appearance. We come to anchor and are immediately surrounded by a fleet of sampans or passenger boats, and are quickly landed at the jetty, where a fierce onslaught on my baggage in made by a score of coolies. It is a war of words in which I can take no part, and I stand quietly by and let them fight 1t out. After fifteen minutes of fierce conflict, I follow the six victorious “Celestials,” who have slung my trunk and satchels on bamboo poles, to the Astor House, not a six-storied granite hotel, but a modest building of two stories, with a garden in front, as unlike its great namesake as can well be imagined. Why called the “Astor House” I have been unable to ascertain, for it is kept in the English style by a full-blooded John Bull. After securing a comfortable room I stroll along the bund, over a handsome iron bridge that spans a creek crowded with boats, and begin to realize that I am indeed in the “flowery kingdom,” and receiving my first impressions of John Chinaman at home. The streets are full of people, coolies carrying heavy burdens on poles across their shoulders, or slung between them in pairs, sedan-chairs of light bamboo, behind the silken curtains of which are stolid Chinamen or bright-eyed “Canton girls,” Europeans dashing along in two-wheeled traps behind diminutive ponies, who make up in speed what they lack in size. But the conveyance par excellence of Shanghai seems to be the wheelbarrow, of which there are thousands here, though entirely unknown