"I remember the saffron legs of my boatman and his sing-song intonation as he hailed some naked neighbour in a passing junk. I began to get the quality of the voices of the Chinese then, as I had heard the native Bengali three years before—a kind of lust in my heart to know what they were saying, and why they said it. I threw up my job and travelled north. I studied long in Shanghai. Long—that is, about two years. Academic Sanscrit didn’t help then. I had to get a new neck. I learned the basic Chinese and then began to put on the flourishes of the provinces. I didn’t do this with the idea of commanding big money, but I began to make money. You see, I was getting something that only eight or ten Americans have. I wanted more than the language. I wanted the working of the Oriental mind. "The only clue to that is religion. I had studied a lot with the Hindu boys in Bengal. That’s what they do best—study, gather in, mull over, meditate, but bolt at the idea of action. I was American enough to want to make some of this study-stuff come true, but that in India was a valuable period of mental accretion. It wasn’t living here in the East that made me in a sense familiar with the native mind—it was the sacred writings of China, India and Palestine. In Shanghai, and later in Peking, I hobnobbed with the young _literati_—a different class from the Indian students, very interesting men who prepare themselves almost cosmically to enter local politics. I saw that China had always pulled me strangely. Meeting the boys here recalled to me how interested I had been in the Chinese students at Palo Alto. It was from a Chinese at college that I began to get a real conception of the historic and esoteric figure of Jesus—the man we make a religion of in the States. Over here the steady-going literature of the best minds is never far from the utterances of the mystics and the prophets. I met them all from Patanjali to Paracelsus and volumes of magic, the spiritual properties of medicine, studies of the stars that none would scoff at so breezily as the modern astronomers of Europe and America.