Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II Swimming turtlelike, along the green surface of the canal, the Apocalypse turned noiselessly to the left and came to rest under the walls of the venerable city of Soochow. A group of ragged, mud-built huts—architectural counterparts of the beggars who occupied them—clustered about the city's western water gate. Stepping off of the gangplank, I passed between their dilapidated walls, went through a cavernous doorway, took two turns to the right, and found myself—in the Arabian Nights! Where but in that fantastic book could there be such a collection of brocades, ivories, translucent amber, glowing enamels, mud, cats, dogs, pigs, pearls, and smells? If Aladdin himself was not visible at the moment, it was only because he had just stepped into the neighboring goldsmith's shop to sell one of his silver plates! What pleasure, I thought, in all the world could compare with the joy of a certain young American I knew, just to be "let loose," absolutely loose, for one day in aChinese city ? He would probably return to his parental roof with incipient cholera, malaria, and fleas; but, in his own vernacular, it would have been "some day" ! In the front of a small shop a calm-eyed wood carver, armed with mallet and chisel, was making the chips fly from a great wooden head of Buddha, as primitive and simple as the Sak- yamuni himself. Beside him a helper glued together two huge blocks of wood to make the god's massive shoulders, while from a lower stratum among the shavings and bench legs an unthinkable din arose from the lusty throats of three puppies and four infants who were all quarreling together in the same common tongue. Next door, two goldbeaters, sitting vis-a-vis, pounded alternately with careful hammers upon the evenly laid "mold" of skins before them. No wonder the...