You walk briskly down the street, as though you were projecting a good long constitutional, in order that no one may be mad enough to think of following you. By and by you make a sudden flank movement that takes you into a lane leading off from the main road. Casting hurried glances back on the way you have just travelled to see that no one is watching you, you make rapid strategic doubles in the direction of the hill, till you find yourself calmly and with a contented mind slowly rising higher and higher, until at last you have fairly left all traces of human life behind you, and you are actually alone. Seating yourself on a grassy mound, you look out on the broad expanse before you, and you breathe a sigh of content. No mechanical sounds of voices, as though they were being ground out by some creaking machinery, fall upon your ears. You hear the sighing of the wind and you see the grasses waving their heads as though they would talk in dumb show with you. You look down at the river, that winds like a silver thread along the plain, and you feel that this contact with nature is a most delightful break on the eternal monotony of faces that may suggest humour and pathos and lurking fun behind a yellow exterior, but never beauty. All at once you receive a shock. You catch the gleam of an eye through an opening in two or three bushes that you never dreamed of concealing anything human behind them. You are startled, for you feel that the Chinaman has outwitted you. You turn round and cast suspicious glances towards a hedge, where wild flowers are growing and that you thought to be the very picture of sylvan solitude, and you see several figures dodging behind it. The delightful sense of being alone vanishes, and you realize that that is an impossibility in China. You stand up disgusted, but with the feeling of amusement predominant, and one after another comes out of his hiding-place, where the black, piercing eyes have been scanning your every movement for the last ten minutes, and at least a dozen ungainly forms creep up to you and with smiling faces try to make friends with you.