If money could only be eliminated out of the life of a mandarin he would cease to be the despicable character he often is. In their private life they are kind and hospitable and have the courtly manners of gentlemen. In their public capacity, when a bribe is not in view, they have a desire as a rule to do justice in the cases that are brought before them. In some respects they are much to be pitied. As no man may be a higher official in his own province, it follows that he has to live far away from his home and his friends, amongst people strange to him, who often speak a different language from his own. It is true that his wife and children accompany him to his new position, but they never cease to long to be back again at the place where their kindred dwell. To be a mandarin means power and the facility for acquiring a fortune, but it means also exile for the time being from the ancestral home, and constant danger of being involved with the higher authorities should any of his mistakes or his misdeeds be brought to light. CHAPTER XIV PEDDLER LIFE IN CHINA The Chinese thrifty--Nothing wasted--Besides regular shopkeepers, there are itinerant dealers--The "candy man"--His various kinds of sweets--The "sweets and sours man"--The cloth peddler--Describe him minutely--The pork peddler--The jewellery peddler--The fortune-teller. The Chinese are a thrifty race. Stern necessity and a widespread poverty that has placed vast masses of them on the very borderland of starvation, have compelled the nation to exercise economies such as are absolutely unknown in the richer lands of the West. We get some idea of the narrow line that divides countless numbers of people from absolute want, by the fact that with regard to food there is nothing of that ever wasted in China. "Wilful waste brings woeful want" is a proverb that Chinese in common life would have great difficulty in understanding, or indeed in any rank of society. The famines that have in all ages desolated great regions in China, and the desperate struggle that is constantly going on for simply enough to eat, have surrounded food as it were with a halo, that would make it seem like sacrilege to misuse what we should throw away as useless or positively hurtful. [Illustration: A PEDDLER.] [Illustration: A SHOEMAKER AT WORK ON THE STREET. _To face p. 296._]