Page:Inside Canton.djvu/60

Rh of the shops, and the magnificent signboards, arranged laterally or transversely at the entrance of the stores, and displaying, upon a black, red, or blue ground, admirable characters, gilt and carved in relief. Whichever way you turned your eyes, to the right or to the left, you always beheld the captious signboards of the traders, which are really charming ornaments, encircling their doors. In no country, not even at Paris, have people ever invented such ingenious means of puffing goods by exhibiting them, and of speaking to the eyes. Twenty times, on catching a glimpse of the strange objects which flitted past me as in a dream, I was tempted to stop; but, under the influence of the irresistible impulse of the crowd, I kept going on and on, obeying, without accounting for it, the magnetism exerted by large assemblies of men. Much more than the poetic lake of Monsieur de Lamartine, was this human river the image of the ocean of ages, on which we sail without ever putting into port!

For more than an hour I had been in the state of Ahasuerus, when the sound of an enormous box on the ear, which re-echoed behind me, caused me to start from my slumber. I turned round suddenly: the crowd had stopt; a Chinaman, with bare feet, and dressed in a pair of trousers not coming further than half-way down his legs, and a cham of dirty cloth, with his head badly shaven, and his queue in disorder, was rubbing his cheek, without