Page:Inside Canton.djvu/27

26 kind, fat face smiled on the laughing little children, who, with clean and well-shaved heads, held their pittance in their hands; the young girl—dressed like a tanka girl, her pig-tail, fastened behind the occiput, falling in a plait down her back—looked at me with a kind and merry expression. Suddenly, the young tanka girl said a few words to me, which I did not understand, and offered me her breakfast: it was rice, seasoned with tao-fou, in a blue porcelain bowl. I took the bowl in my left hand, and the little sticks which are used in China to eat with, in the right. The grains of rice, well boiled and quite separated from one another, were polished and semi-transparent: they were like pearls just drawn from the depths of the ocean. The tao-fou, white like thick cream, and fried in the oil of the sesamum, partly covered the nourishing grain; and over this mess was spread a brown liquid, which formed designs like those we admire on the buildings of raised pastry constructed by Swiss architects, vulgarly called pastry-cooks. This dish was very nice. I thought that among the Europeans who go to China, there are very few who have the opportunity of eating the scanty pittance of the poor, and I did not hesitate to taste it.

With the ease of a Frenchman who would not regret being a Chinese, I took the little sticks between my thumb, first, and middle fingers, and I began by taking a few grains of rice, which I carried