The servant question is a most interesting one for watching the play of thought and the subtle and unexpected ways in which the Yellow brain works. It is at times a very irritating one, and is apt to give one distorted views of the whole Chinese race, and to cause one to make sweeping statements about the general incapacity of the whole nation. In one's saner moments one will freely confess that the home servants are on the whole less obliging and more exacting than the same class out here. There is besides the ludicrous element in the Chinese, that always takes off the edge of almost any unpleasantness. Even when one is most annoyed there is something so funny about the way in which a Chinaman acts, that one's anger is most likely to explode in laughter. There is one thing highly in their favour, and that is their great love and tenderness for children. Taking them all in all, any one who has had large experience of the servants in China can honestly declare that on the whole they are a faithful and satisfactory class of people. CHAPTER VI THE ADAPTABILITY AND TENACITY OF PURPOSE OF THE CHINESE Can live and thrive in any climate--Absence of nerves--Bear pain heroically--Great staying power--A long ride through the country--Dogged inflexibility of ordinary Chinese--Contempt for other countries. The strength of the Chinaman lies in his power to adapt himself to the circumstances in which he may be situated. Place him in a northern climate where the sun's rays have lost their fire, and where the snow falls thickly and the ice lays its wintry hand upon the forces of nature, and he will thrive as though he had descended from an ancestry that had always lived in a frozen region. Transport him to the torrid zone, where the sun is a great ball of molten flame, where the air is as hot as though it had crossed a volcano, and where the one thought is how to get cool in this intolerable maddening heat, and he will move about with an ease and a comfort just as if a sultry climate was the very thing that his system demanded. He is so cosmopolitan in his nature that it seems to be a matter of indifference where he may be or what his environment. He will travel along lofty peaks, where the snows of successive winters lie unmelted, or he will sleep in a grass hut where the fever-bearing mosquitoes will feast upon him the livelong night to the sound of their own music, and he will emerge from it next morning with a face that shows that the clouds of anopheles have left him a victor on the field. He will descend into the sultry tin mines of Siam, and at night he will stretch himself on the hard, uneven ground, with a clod for his pillow, and he will rise as refreshed as though he had slept on a bed of down. [Illustration: JUNKS (ON THE YANG-TSE RIVER).]