Page:Inside Canton.djvu/68

Rh I was, one day, going through the streets of Tin-hay with an English officer. As we were passing a barber's shop, we stopped to see an individual shampooed: he was a burly tradesman, whose face, breast, and neck, resembled the plump, yellow rump of a fat goose. The sybarite had his eyes closed; he was smiling, and breathing loudly, and had a face as resplendent as that of one of the elect. While contemplating him, my companion was seized with a mad idea. These soldiers are so coarse! Without the barber perceiving what he was doing, he seized a pail of water with both hands, and threw the contents, from a distance of three paces, over the torso of the beatified tradesman. On receiving this inundation, hurled with a steady hand, the sensual child of the Central Empire bounded up to his feet. It was the first and only time I ever saw a Chinaman really in a rage. He foamed at the mouth; he stamped his feet; he skipped about; he bellowed! But the good Chinese have no idea of giving an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, and the Chinaman in question did not even think of throwing the empty pail at the head of the practical joker.

The barbers' shops are, in China, what they formerly were in Europe, a place of meeting for idlers and scandalmongers; it is there that tittle-tattle and ill-natured stories are bandied about; for China, too, has its slanderous chronicle! Thus we see, that their civilisation, which is considered so