We slept, rolled up in our blankets, on the floor of a Chinese compound ... adventurers bound up and down the river, to and from Tien-Tsin and Woo-shi-Woo and Pekin ... a sort of caravanserai.... * * * * * Though it was the fall of the year and the nights were cold enough to make two blankets feel good, yet some days the sun blazed down intolerably on our boat, on the river.... When we grew thirsty the captain and myself resorted to our jug of distilled water. I had been warned against drinking the yellow, pea-soup-like water of the Pei-ho.... But one afternoon I found our water had run out. So I took the gourd used by the Chinese crew, and dipped up, as they did, the river water. The captain clutched me by the wrist. "Don't drink that water! If you'd seen what I have, floating in it, you'd be afraid!" "What won't hurt a Chinaman, won't hurt me," I boasted.... The result of my folly was a mild case of dysentery.... In a few days I was so weak that I went around as if I had no bones left in my body. And I wanted to leave the country. And I repaired to Captain ---- who had given me the job, and asked him for my pay and my discharge. He lit into me, disgusted, upbraiding me for a worthless tramp.... "I might have known that you were of that ilk, from the first, just by looking at you!" He handed me the eighty dollars in Mexican silver, that was coming to me.... I repaid the captain the forty I had borrowed, for food. "Sick! yes, sick of laziness!" Captain ---- was partly right. I had an uncontrollable distaste for the monotony of daily work, repeated in the same environment, surrounded by the same scenery ... but I was also quite weak and sick, and I am persuaded, that, if I had stayed on there, I might have died. * * * * * I sat on one of the wharves and played host to a crowd of romantic thoughts that moved in their pageant through my brain ... now I would go on to Pekin and see the great Forbidden City. Now I would dress in Chinese clothes and beg my way through the very heart of the Chinese Empire ... and write a book, subsequently, about my experiences and adventures ... and perhaps win a medal of some famous society for it ... and I had a dream of marrying some quaintly beautiful mandarin's daughter, of becoming a famous, revered Chinese scholar, bringing together with my influence the East and the West.... I reached so far, in the dream, as to buy several novels of the Chinese, printed in their characters, of an itinerant vendor.... The everyday world swung into my ken again. Three junks, laden with American marines, dropping down the river from Pekin, cut across my abstracted gaze ... the boys were singing. They marched off on the dock on which I sat. They were stationed right where they deployed from the junks. Men were put in guard over them.