Shanghai means, "approaching the sea," and I spoze it might just as well mean approaching from the sea, as we did. Old Shanghai is surrounded by a wall and moat and is entered by six gates, the roads are only ten feet wide and dirty and bad smellin', and most of its houses are small, though there are a few very fine buildings, according to their style, lots of little piazzas jutting out everywhere with the ends turned up, that seems to be their taste; why a ruff or a piazza straight acrost would have been a boon to my Jonesville trained eyes. The houses on the principal streets are used for shops; no winders on the first floor; they are all open in front during the day and closed by heavy latticework at night.
The favorite carriage here is a wheelbarrow, the wheel in the centre and a seat on each side. Josiah and I got into one, he carryin' Tommy in his lap, but he sez with a groan:
"I never spozed that I should git down to this, Samantha, to ride in a wheelbarrow. What would Ury say! I am glad he can't see it, or Deacon Henzy or any of the other Jonesville brothers and sistern."
The furrin suburbs are laid out like a European city, with broad streets, well lighted and clean. We went on the Bubbling Well Road, named from a boiling spring a few miles out. The road is broad and smooth as glass with beautiful villas along the way; we also passed a great number of small burying places. They have to bury folks according to the rules of Feng Shui. If Feng Shui should order a burial place in a dooryard it would have to be there. It rules buildings, customs, laws, everything. I asked a Chinaman who could talk English what this Feng Shui wuz that they had to obey it so strictly, and he described it as being like the wind and water: like wind because you don't know where it come from nor when it would go or where; and like water because you could never know how to grasp it, it would elude you and slip away and you would have nothing in your hand to show. Miss Meechim cried out about the enormity of such a law and laid it to the evil doin's of furriners, but Arvilly said that it wuz some like the laws we had in America, for we found out on inquiry that money would most always appease this great Feng Shui and git it to consent to most anything if it wuz paid enough, just as it did in America.