did. Besides, the yard was invaded so closely on our heels that nothing

would have been gained by locking the gate. The door of the mud house that usually served as church, as well as for the sleeping-room of the local pastor and ourselves, was no barrier to the advance. Long before the preliminary tea was poured for us there was a compact wall of humanity drawn so tightly about us that we could barely move our elbows, and the sea of fixedly staring faces stretched away to infinity out through the yard. Now and then an undercurrent of discontent at inequality of proximity surged through the multitude, to break against our ribs or toss smaller urchins in between our legs and over our knees. When at length it came time to open our cots and sleeping-bags, there was still a large audience to such disrobing as we cared to do under such conditions, and it was an hour or two afterward before the most privileged characters had been convinced that they, too, should retire. Nor were we by any means out of bed next morning when there appeared the vanguard of the throng that was to wall us in all that day. It was hard somehow to understand just why a town which often saw foreigners still came to stand by the hour watching with the fixed eyes of a statue our every slightest movement, be it only the tying of a shoe-lace or the buttoning of a coat.

A large number of those about us bore famous names. Many a Chinese village is made up almost exclusively of persons having the same surname and the same ancestors, and Chung-Hsin-Tien, being no great distance from the birthplace of either, contains many descendants of both Confucius and Mencius. There was Meng the shopkeeper and Kung the cook, both Christians, right within the mission compound, and it was easy to find in any small crowd others bearing those illustrious names. Once I came upon a Mencius squatting in the dirt at the corner nearest the gate, shoveling away with worn chop-sticks a cracked bowlful of some uninviting food, and so ignorant that he fled in dismay when I suggested a photograph, refusing to have his soul thus taken from him. A little farther up the street a Confucius sold peanuts in little heaps at a copper each. Missionaries in this region say that those bearing the two famous names are so numerous that the difficulty of making converts is increased, because they are so proud of their ancestry that they will seldom risk the stigma attached to changing to a “foreign” faith. Yet there was a Confucius from this very town who was now a Presbyterian preacher, and the two names appear rather frequently on the church registers of southern Shantung.

Of late years at least it is not unduly easy to become an accepted Christian there. My companion spent half that Sunday morning in putting a dozen candidates through a long catechism, and permitted only two of them to join the church at once, baptizing them—from a tea-cup—at the morning service. It was fully as easy, too, to get out of the church as to get into it; one of the hardest and most important tasks of the missionaries is to see that backsliders are dropped from membership. Almost before we had entered the hole in the mud wall that passed for a city gate a rather addle-pated old man had appeared, hugging his well-worn Bible under his arm; and as long as we remained he hovered close about us, grinning at us upon the slightest provocation, as if to say, “We are brethren, far above this common herd.” He was about the first convert in the region—and one of the chief thorns in the flesh of the itinerator. For the latter had been forced to drop him from the church rolls years before because he had taken a concubine, and there was still no prospect of his being granted forgiveness, even though he had advanced the ingenious argument that he had been compelled to the act by his mother, lest the family graveyards be left without attendants. Yet he continued his church-going as religiously as if he were one of the principal deacons. Perhaps it was just retribution that he still had no son, in spite of his lapse from the tight missionary way. I confess that I did not quite follow the reasoning which made it quite all right to admit the concubine herself to church membership, but I have always been dense on theological niceties.

The day was delightful, and services were held out in the yard. Perhaps twoscore men and half as many women, not to mention a veritable flock of children, crowded together on the narrow little benches taken from the mud-hut church, or stood behind them. I could not but admire the endurance of the missionary, and silently congratulate him on the sturdiness inherited from his “Pennsylvania Dutch” ancestors. For it can scarcely be a mere mental relaxation to talk incessantly, earnestly, and energetically for an hour in a tongue as foreign as the southern Shantung dialect, while Chinese urchins by the dozen, from seatless-trousered infancy to devilish early youth, seemed to be doing their utmost to make life about them unbearable; and when even the adults frequently displayed habits that are not usual in our own church gatherings. Or, if this is not enough to try any man’s strength and patience, there was the frequent torture of listening to the horrible imitation of our hymns perpetrated, with missionary connivance, by the congregation. Evidently no Chinese can “hold” a tune, but he can do almost anything else to it which a vivid imagination can picture. Why their own “music” cannot be adapted to religious purposes to better advantage is one of those innumerable questions which flock about the traveler in China like mosquitos in a swamp.

Evening services of almost as strenuous a nature, and many personal conferences on religious or financial matters, plumply filled out the day, and early next morning, when the last clinging convert had been shaken off without the suggestion of violence that would have planted a little nucleus of discontent in the community, we were away again by wheelbarrow. I am in no position to testify as to how strictly the few Christians of Chung-Hsin-Tien lived up to their faith in every-day life, but they, and no small number of their as unwashed and ragged fellow-townsmen, missed mighty little of the vaudeville performance which the appearance of a foreigner or two in almost any Chinese town seems to be considered by the inhabitants. This time we had three barrow-men, one of them a first-class candidate for famine relief funds, whose insistent smile at this unexpected windfall of a job was less surprising than the mulish endurance he somehow got out of a chaff and bean-hull diet. Less brute strength is required, however, in the handling of a Chinese wheelbarrow than appearances suggest. During the afternoon I changed places for a bit with the coolie between the front handles, and while I would not care to adopt barrowing as a profession while some less confining source of livelihood remains to me, the thing ran, on the level at least, more like a perambulator than the most optimistic could have imagined. The Chinese are adepts in the art of balancing, and the wheelbarrow, like the rickshaw and the “Peking cart,” is so adjusted as to call for less exertion than the sight of it suggests. Ups and downs, sand or soft earth, sheer edges of “road,” and the passing of many similar vehicles where there is no room to pass, however, make an all-day journey no mere excursion even to a team of three barrow-men.

Women and children were scratching about here and there in the fields; the men were bringing manure in two big baskets fixed on a barrow, such as carry the night-soil of Peking out through the city gates, and were piling it in little mounds differing from the myriad graves only in size. The New Year season was visibly over, and the incessant working-days had come again. Somehow the name “Shantung” had always called up the picture of a half-wild region, in spite of the protests of reason; I found it instead very thoroughly tamed, as befits one of the most populous regions on the globe—tamed at least in the agricultural sense. When it came to such afflictions as bandits, officials, and the Yellow River there is still much taming to be done in the province of Confucius.

We passed almost incessantly through villages. High on the tops of the smooth, bare hills that grew up as we advanced were rings of what seemed to be stone, refuges built at the time of the Taiping Rebellion, which came to a standstill in this very region. They were only walls, with perhaps still a well inside, though the suspicion was growing that bandits were finding a new use for them. Once we passed close on the left an isolated stony peak that is as sacred as Tai-Shan, though much less famous. Thousands of country people climb it, especially in the New Year season, either as their only penance excursion, or as a part of their pilgrimage through all the holy land of China. It is a rough and uninviting climb, but nowhere is filial devotion more generously rewarded, if we are to believe the faithful. Therefore one may on almost any day see the son of an ailing father, dressed only in his Chinese trousers, holding his hands with palms together in front of him, a stick of burning incense between them, marching to the top of the mountain without once taking his eyes off the rising thread of smoke before him. A crowd follows close behind, and one of these carries the clothing of the devotee, whose father is certain to recover under this treatment—unless one of several hundred little incidents occur to make the penance useless.

That night, in the mission-owned mud hut of another unlaundered town, my companion preached a long sermon full of energy to a congregation of five, one of whom was part-witted, two often asleep, and another merely one of our barrow-men. Only the village “doctor,” whose training consisted of a year as coolie in a mission hospital, kept his attention strictly on the business in hand, as should be expected of the chief, even though somewhat fragile, pillar of Christendom in the region. There had been an audience of goodly size for such a locality in the early part of the evening. Not only was the hut crowded with the score it would hold, but at least twice as many more blocked the open door or flattened their noses against the single dirty window. But a few rifle-shots had suddenly sounded somewhere off toward the hills. Bandits had raided, looted, and kidnapped in this town several times during the year just over; and though there was no sudden exodus—for the Chinese must “save face” under all circumstances—the audience melted steadily away until only the five remained. The itinerating missionary, however, must never let outside influences affect even the tone of the message he is ever seeking to deliver. Whatever his benefits to the field he is cultivating—and a wide experience is needed to acquire any certain knowledge on this subject—he at least still has some of the hardships of early missionary days, which his thousands of well housed colleagues, even in China, only know by hearsay.

Tenghsien seemed to be far enough south to be tinged with the problems and customs of southern China. Its dialect was audibly at variance with that of Peking, even to an ear of slight Chinese training. On the wall of the vault-like passage through the southern city gate hung several time-blackened wooden crates containing the shoes of former magistrates. It is one of the politenesses of the region to stop a departing magistrate at the gate and remove his footwear, as a way of saying, “We hate so badly to see you leave that we will do everything within our power to prevent your going.” How careful such an official may be to make sure that the ceremony is not omitted in his case, even though he has to detail the shoe-pilferers, or whether or not he slips on the oldest footwear in his possession that morning, are of course unauthorized peeps behind the scenery such as tend to take all the poetry out of life. We dropped in at the local pawnshop, with which my host was on good terms rather out of policy than necessity, but it was nothing now but a huge compound of empty buildings, crowded together in almost labyrinthian turmoil. The pawnshop is one of the most important institutions in any Chinese community, with many curious little idiosyncrasies unknown to our own displayers of the golden balls, but it can scarcely be expected to continue to function where, between grasping officials and bandits frequently sweeping in from the hills, neither the ticketed articles nor the cash on hand can be kept from disappearing.

The throwing out of sick babies seemed to be a fixed habit in Tenghsien, though one seldom hears of such cases farther north. Millions of Chinese parents believe that if a child dies before the age of six or seven it is because it was really no child at all, but only an evil spirit masquerading as one; and unless it is gotten rid of in time, woe betide the other children of the family, already born or to come. It is preferable apparently that it be eaten by dogs, but above all it must not die in the house. The missionaries of Tenghsien have grown to take this custom as a matter of course. If in their movements about town they came upon a discarded baby still alive, they did what they could to relieve its sufferings, but they did not “register” surprise. The Chinese merely passed by on the farther side of the street. To touch an abandoned child would be to invite the evil spirit to your own house, unless it proved, by getting well, to be merely a sick child, and no Chinese is brave enough to run any such risk as that. Not long before my arrival, the mission “Bible woman” had found a girl of two thrown out on a pile of filth, and even she had dared do nothing more than sit and fan the flies off it, until it died. The missionaries, however, have come to be looked upon as immune from these evil spirits. More than one garbage-heap baby graces the mission kindergarten, and a man of some standing now in the town carries on his face the teeth-marks of the dog to which he was abandoned. It is not all mere superstition either, the missionaries assert, but dread of responsibility, hatred of initiative, often mere selfishness, masquerading as such. Many Chinese may actually fear that the river spirit will get them if they save a drowning person, but many others are merely afraid of wetting their clothes.

The Western and the Chinese mind may be similar in construction, but they certainly do not work alike. Let the missionaries take a girl for a year’s training, for instance, or for the temporary relief of her parents, and they are sure to be informed when the period is over that it is their duty to care for her the rest of her life. As it is contrary to the Chinese idea of politeness to mind one’s own business, so their gratitude seems to be of a different brand from ours. Something akin to that feeling is no doubt now and then felt, in otherwise unoccupied moments, for the men and women from overseas who spend their lives trying to instil into Chinese youth such wisdom and right living as they themselves possess; yet rarely does the passing visitor get a hint of anything more than superficial politeness toward the benefactors, and the assumption that they are somehow making a fine thing, financially or materially, out of their labors—otherwise why would they continue them?

Sometimes Tenghsien buries its children, like those of its paupers who do not belong to the beggars’ gild, in such shallow, careless graves that the dogs habitually dig them up again. These surly brutes sat licking their chops here and there on the outskirts of town, among discolored rags of what had once been cotton-padded clothing scattered about little mussed-up holes in the ground. Lepers were treated with a similar policy of abandonment, or “let the foreigners do something about it if they must.” The same American woman who had the highest record for rescuing babies from the garbage-heap had built the only leper-home in Shantung, if not in northwest China, a mile or two outside Tenghsien. As far as the Chinese are concerned lepers run about the country as freely as any one else. They may not be exactly popular—for the people know the horrors of the disease and easily recognize its symptoms—but they can scarcely be avoided. The thirty or more men and boys, who had been gathered together in a two-story brick building many times more splendid than the homes any of them had known before, had that same cheerful, seldom complaining, easily smiling demeanor of the Chinese coolie under any misfortune. Only a few were bedridden, for the greater resistance to disease for which the Chinese are famous seems to spare them some of the more horrible ravages of leprosy. But on one point they were losing their cheery patience. For months they had submitted weekly to injections of chaulmugra oil without any visible signs of improvement. The treatment is painful; they all admitted it, and one fat-faced boy of fourteen was pointed out as “tearing the walls apart with his screams” when it was administered to him. But his quick retort to the charge seemed to be the consensus of opinion: “Oh, please let us live without the needle and go to heaven in peace when our time comes!” Such efforts were being made to build a similar refuge for women—who of course always come second in China—that even the men sufferers were asked to contribute the few coppers they could live without—and when it is finally built, through missionary effort, it will pay taxes to the local authorities, like many other mission institutions.

Under more auspicious circumstances I should have struck off into that labyrinth of mountains occupying the southeastern part of Shantung. But it might have meant a very much longer stay than I cared to make. For years now the mountainous parts of the province have been overrun more or less continuously by what we call bandits. The Chinese call them “_hung-hu-tze_” (“red beards,” a term evidently originating in Manchuria, where bearded men from the north seem to have been the first raiders, and to have suggested a clever disguise for native rascals) or “_tu-fei_” (which means something like “local badness coming out of the ground”). But under any name they are a thorn in the side of their fellow-men. In Peking, where the so-called Central Government still decorates foreign passports with separate visés for each province, five at a time, even though the provincial authorities rarely look at them, conditions were admitted with a frankness which other Governments might copy to advantage. I had been given permission to travel freely in Shantung—“_except_ in the areas of Tungchowfu, Linchengchow, Tsaochowfu, Yenchowfu, and the regions controlled by the Kiao Taoyin.” In other words, one could go anywhere, so long as one kept within sprinting distance of the two railway lines. As a matter of fact, much of the information of the Central Government was out of date; places it excepted were now peaceful, and others it did not mention were infested with brigands. Yenchowfu, for instance, showed no more ominous signs when I passed through it than any other sleepy old walled town; and the world at large knows how safe the railways themselves were just about this season. Had there been any good reason to run the risk, the chances are that I could have gone anywhere in Shantung without anything serious happening to me; on the other hand, I might have been carried off before I got well into the foot-hills.

The mountainous sections in which the brigands were operating most freely are merely poorer, less populous parts of the crowded province, where there is little to be seen except smaller editions of what may be found within easier reach elsewhere. Now and then they had entered Tenghsien, the station of my “itinerating” companion; only recently they had posted a warning on the mission gate in Yihsien, reached by a branch-line a little farther south, that unless some large sum of cash was forthcoming within a hundred days the place would be burned. The women and children had been sent to safer stations, and outposts of agricultural and evangelistic work had been temporarily abandoned. It was near Lincheng, the very junction of the Yihsien line, and the next large town south of Tenghsien, that a score of foreign passengers were to be taken from the most important express in China a few weeks later and carried off into these same hills. The brigands, in fact, hard pressed for a way out of their difficulties, debated the wisdom of taking the missionaries of Tenghsien and neighboring stations as the lever they needed against the authorities. It is more in keeping with justice that they finally decided to hold up the express instead and be sure of hostages with wealth and influence enough to assure the world’s taking notice of them, for the missionaries have lived for years in constant danger of such a raid, while most of the passengers were well fed individuals who had left home mainly in quest of experience.

When Tenghsien came to be altogether too closely pressed by bandits, the authorities fell back upon a scheme to drive them away without bloodshed. The Boxers, it will be recalled, had their origin in southern Shantung, and the method by which they fancied they made themselves immune to injury by their foes is still widely believed there. The authorities therefore, or private individuals with the initiative needed, called in some countrymen with stout faith in the efficacy of this form of protection and paid magicians two dollars each to make them “immune.” This is accomplished by various forms of hocus-pocus, in which the swallowing of bits of paper with certain characters written on them, and the wearing of similar charms, are the chief features. Not only did the countrymen believe that this made them proof against bullets, swords, and bayonets, but, what made the investment really useful, the brigands also believe it. When care had been taken to have word of the ceremonies reach the bandit camps, the “immune” persons were placed in front of the government troops, who moved slowly but steadily out into the hills. The outlaws knew the futility of wasting precious ammunition on men whom it would be impossible to injure; hence they gracefully retreated as far from town as the authorities chose to drive them. There was, of course, the slight danger that some skeptic among the bandits would doubt the efficacy of the charm. But the Chinese are much more given to swallowing their popular beliefs whole than to investigating their worth, and in the case of an unforeseen accident the evidence would be plain, not that the hocus-pocus is ineffectual, but that it was badly performed.

Not far below Tenghsien the railway crosses the old bed of the Yellow River, that greatest of Chinese vagrants. As far back as history is recorded this has changed its mind every few centuries and decided to go somewhere else. It is not a believer in the old adage that as you make your bed so you should lie in it, for the Hoang Ho has the custom, not usual even among rivers, of piling up its course until it flows some twenty feet above the surrounding country, puny mankind meanwhile striving feverishly to confine it by dikes which cannot in the end keep pace with the growth of silt between them. No Chinese can be expected to be comfortable on so elevated a bed, much less a river, and when things become altogether too unbearable the Hoang Ho suddenly abandons its course and makes a new one overnight. The last great change of this kind was in the middle of the past century, when, swinging on a pivot near Kaifeng, one of China’s many old-time capitals, it struck northeastward across Shantung to the gulf of Chihli, though it had formerly emptied into the Yellow Sea hundreds of miles farther south, barely touching Shantung at all. Shantung did not want it, but it had no choice in the matter. The provinces which had been so suddenly relieved of so violent an enemy, and at the same time presented with a large strip of land where land is so badly needed, certainly were not going to help, nor even permit, if it could be avoided, restoration to the old bed. Besides, there are both historical and visible evidences that Shantung had harbored the unwelcome visitor more than once before, that the two mountainous parts of the province were probably once islands, and that the Yellow River, washing back and forth between them, has built up the level and more fertile parts of the country. Similar things happened in many parts of the world, but in most cases the job was finished before man appeared, whereas in China it is still going on. The result is that man finds himself very much in the way during the process.

Chinese history is full of accounts of the struggle to keep the Hoang Ho within limits. Some emperors are famous chiefly for their struggles against it. For centuries the “squeeze” connected with the building of dikes, or even their maintenance, has been one of the richest perquisites of certain official positions. Perhaps this is why the latest task of wrestling with the Yellow River has been given to an American firm established in China. Two years ago the river broke through its dikes again, though this time within a hundred miles of its mouth, and inundated what to crowded Shantung is an immense area, destroying many villages and withdrawing the land about them from cultivation. Several walled cities, too, were in great peril, particularly Litsing, situated in a bend of the river, and _below_ it; for here as in its former course to the south the stream has gradually silted itself higher and higher, until one crossing it anywhere along its lower reaches must climb thirty or forty feet to the top of the dike from the land side, to descend only ten or twelve to the river. In flood season the waters washed at the walls of Litsing, which in time they must have undermined and broken, drowning out the city. Famine relief funds improved the lot of those who had been driven from their homes, some of whom built new shelters on the broad tops of the dikes, while others scattered, particularly to Manchuria. The dead and the living between them so crowd the land in Shantung that if one patch is taken away there is no other room for those who live upon it. Bids were asked for the task of retaming the river, to be paid for jointly from relief funds and by the province; the American firm offered to do the work at just one fourth the price asked by Chinese contractors, and having secured itself against the common misfortune of those working for Chinese Governments by insisting on monthly prepayments, tackled a job that was old when Confucius was a boy.

Clumsy native boats, bringing down rock for the work, as well as coolies and supplies, will carry one from Tzinan to the scene of operations in a day or two; but the more hasty American way is by automobile from Choutsun, two hours east of the capital on the Shantung railway. What is known in China as a motor-road, that is, a raised causeway made entirely of soft yellowish earth, which cuts up into ever deeper ruts, growing impassable with much rain, its steep sides gradually crumbling away until the barely two-car width is reduced to the point when passing is impossible for much of the distance, runs northward to the river, where cars take to the top of the dike. The workmen, strange as it may seem, are not so numerous as the company would like, and recruiting has to be carried on at considerable distances. The proverbial Chinese distrust of the “outside barbarian” has something to do with this; perhaps fear of bringing down upon their heads the wrath of the river gods for interfering with him may deter others; naturally in this season of the lunar New Year many had gone back to their ancestral graves. To put into American dollars and cents the wages paid would be to give a false impression of penuriousness on the part of the company; suffice it to say, therefore, that they are much higher than the average of wages in Shantung, that millet and rice and other essentials are furnished at cost to the employees, thereby saving them from heartless exploitation by their fellow-countrymen of the merchant class, and that reeds and other materials are supplied for covering their lodging-places. These are neither more nor less than holes dug in the earth; but mud dwellings, whether above or below the ground, have been the lot of Chinese coolies for many centuries, at least since the forests were turned into fuel and coffins, and these have the advantage that they can be moved in a few hours with a shovel as the work advances.

Here several thousand coolies already, with two or three times as many to come, it is expected, are engaged in straightening out a great crook in the river. The methods are of course those of the Orient, where many men with shovels and baskets, swarming like trains of leaf-cutting ants over the scene of activities, are more economical than snorting steam-shovels and endless strings of rattling freight-cars. In the early spring, when mountains of broken ice from up the river joined that which had covered the flooded region during the short winter, the sight was one worth coming many _li_ to see. But that was gone now, even in the middle of March, and the task of taking a kink out of “China’s Sorrow” is on the high road to completion. The plan is to teach the river the way it should go, and then let it scour out its own channel. Western initiative and ingenuity, however, probably can no more cure permanently the vagrancy of the Hoang Ho than did the ancient emperors, and corrective measures will have to be applied to the incorrigible vagabond among rivers at least for centuries to come.