Page:Mr. Wu (IA mrwumilnlouisejo00milniala).pdf/35

 CHAPTER V

But the homeward journey was even more delightful than the journey coming had been. The mandarin was very good to the boy, even a little kinder than his wont, watching him narrowly with a gentle smile glinting in the narrow old eyes.

The air was pungent with the smells of coming autumn. In the wayside orchards the trees bent with ripening fruit and were heavy with thick harvest of glistening and prickly-sheathed nuts.

There were still strawberries for the gathering, and the raspberries and blackberries were ripe. The wayside was flushed with great waxen pink begonia flowers and fringed by a thousand ferns. The air was sweet and succulent for miles from the blossoms of the orange trees, and on the same trees the great gold globes hung ripe. And the feathery bamboo was everywhere—the fairest thing that grows in Asia.

They passed groups of girls gathering the precious deposit of insect wax off the camellia trees—blue-clad, sunburnt girls, singing as they worked.

Once—for a great lark, and just to see what such common places were really like—Wu Li Chang and Muir had tea at an inn, a three-roofed peaked thing built astride the road. The mandarin did not join them, but stayed to pray at a wayside shrine dedicated to Lingwun—the soul.