Page:Inside Canton.djvu/47

46 The piastres are sometimes stamped through with such a number of characters that they are quite disfigured, and look like so much metallic lace. But this accumulation of stamps is intended almost always to conceal some fraud; either the pieces have not the legal weight, or the holes made by the punching have been filled up with some alloy.

In the great commercial houses, the comprador—that is to say, the man entrusted with the purchases of the house—acts as tester; but at Macao and Canton there are some persons who make it a special profession, and who go from house to house to verify the sums received. I saw at M. de Lagrené's a man who was a type of the class. When he had money to examine, he took up his position beneath the verandah of the embassy, and went conscientiously to work. But he only used his right hand; his left seemed to be paralysed, and to be condemned to perpetual repose, the fact being that each finger was surmounted by a nail whose length was greater than that of the finger itself.

These pieces of yellow horn were frightful; they were like those wax puppets which the conjurors of the streets exhibit with their dirty fingers to the great admiration of little children. He never used his left hand, except when it was necessary to spin some doubtful piastre in the air. The Chinese men of fashion leave these exaggerations to parvenus who