Well, we met the potentate in our own clothes and he met us in his own clothes, jest as he and we had a right to. He wuz a real sensible man, so Robert Strong said, and he understood a good deal of his talk and ort to know.
Well, from Shanghai we sailed for Hongkong and then embarked for Point de Galle on the island of Ceylon, expectin' to stop on the way at Saigon in Cochin-China and Singapore.
It wuz dretful windy and onpleasant at first. It is much pleasanter to read about a monsoon in Jonesville with your feet on a base burner than to experience one on a steamer. Everything swayed and tipped and swung, that could, even to our stomachs. We only made a short stop at Saigon--a hotter place I wuz never in. I thought of the oven in our kitchen range and felt that if Philury wuz bakin' bread and meat and beans and got into the oven to turn 'em, she knew a little about the climate we wuz enjoying.
As we ascended the river our ship got a little too near the shore and kinder run its prow into a jungle where the monkeys hung from the tree-tops and made fun of us, I spoze, mad at our invadin' their domain and wanted us to pay, 'tennyrate the muskeeters sent in their bills, sharp ones. Saigon is a pretty place set in its tropical scenery; it has eighty or ninety thousand inhabitants and belongs to France. The natives are small and slower than time in the primer.
Singapore is an island in the straits of Malacca and is twenty-four milds long and fourteen wide; it is a British province ruled by native princes under the Queen. Here the days and nights are of equal length and it rains about every day; it has a mixed population, Chinamen, Malays, Europeans and a few Americans, mebby a hundred thousand in all.
We didn't stay long here, but rode out in what they called a Jherry lookin' like a dry goods box drawed by a couple of ponies.
Josiah sez to me, "I am glad that the Malay coolers wear a little more than the Japans." And the coolies here did wear besides their red loin cloth a narrer strip of white cotton cloth hangin' over their left shoulders. Our hotel wuz a very comfortable one; it consisted of several buildin's two stories high connected by covered halls; it wuz surrounded by handsome trees and beautiful ornamental shrubbery and flowers.