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 CHAPTER XI

Kowloon was drenched with sunlight, and the lotus garden was drenched with music. A minstrel paused a moment to drink in the beauty of the great lilies, white, yellow, pink, amber and mauve, one that had cost a fortune, clear pale blue, one that had cost more, a delicate jade green.

The strolling singer retuned his lute and moved across the garden, singing as he went.

It was the typical garden of a rich Chinese home—so repeatedly caricatured on the "willow-tree-pattern" crockery of cheap European commerce—caricatured but also somewhat accurately portrayed. But the gardens on the plates for sale in half the pawnshops in outer London (the aristocracy of the pawnbrokers will not look at them any more), in every household furnisher's in Marylebone and Camberwell, in Battersea and Shoreditch, and on the business streets of every British town and village, are of one uniform Chinese blue—the blue the sampsan women wear when their clothes are new—and background of white, Chinese white, appropriately enough. This living garden in Kowloon was of every vivid hue on nature's prodigal palette, and its background was of blue hills and purple haze and blue, white and limpid golden sky.

A twisted camel's back bridge of carved stonework, like coarse lace in its pierced tracery, dragons squatting and guarding its corners, and flowers hung from it