“Indeed, yes!” cried the viceroy softly, with deep feeling. “It is the most difficult moment, I have sometimes felt, in a man's life. It is the summit of loneliness, for there is no man among his friends who can share his view, and there is none who would not misunderstand and censure him. And yet, a country, a people, like a city, does present to the alien eye, a complete impression, it exhibits clearly outlined characteristics that can be observed in no other way. Even the alien lose? that clear, true impression on very short acquaintance. He then becomes, like all the others, a part of the picture he has once seen.” “It is so, Your Excellency. My country, in that first, startled, clear glance, affected me--I may as well use the word--unpleasantly. It was utterly different from anything I had known, a trader's paradise, a place of unbelievable confusion, of an activity that bewildered, rushing to what end I could not understand.” He was speaking now not only in the Chinese language but in the idiom as well, generalizing rhetorically as the Chinese do. It was almost as if the words came from a Chinese mind. They were silent for a time Then the viceroy asked, in his gently abrupt way: “Why did you leave the church?” “Because I sinned.” “Against the church?” “That, and my own faith.” “Were you asked to leave?” “No.” “They knew of your sin?” “I told them.” “Yet they would have kept you?” “Yes. My own feeling was that my superior temporized.” “He knew your value.” “I can not say as to that. But he wished me to marry again. I couldn't do that--not in the spirit intended. Not as I felt.” “We are different, Griggsby Doane, you and I. I am a Manchu, you an American. The customs of our two lands are very different. What would seem a sin to you, might not seem so to me. Yet I, too, have a conscience to which I must answer. I believe I understand you. It is, I see, because of your conscience that you sit before me now, on this boat and in this uniform, a man, as your great Edward Everett Hale has phrased it, without a country.”