Or again: "Mr. John! Now that man does real good. He has worked away for years, and every one must respect him. His is real solid work."
Then again, Mr. Baller of Ngankin. He is only to be named for every one who knows him to burst out into a eulogy. Mr. Studd's cricket renown is too widely spread not to make him exceptional from the outset; but those who have come across him in China seem already to have found out other things yet more noteworthy about him.
Thus the conversation goes on about pretty well every missionary any one knows anything about; and yet it winds up as it began: "But the missionaries generally are quite different,--hang about and make believe--and save money--and go home!" These typical missionaries no one seems to have ever met; yet every one who has been to China must agree one hears plenty about them. It begins on the voyage out, when you are told about the poor girls--the enthusiastic, misguided young girls they lure out to wretchedness, nobody knows where. "Clap them into Chinese dress the moment they arrive, and send them off up-country, where there is not a single European, in carts and all sorts of miserable conveyances. That's what they do. Why, the poor girls don't know themselves where they are going to."
This is the oft-repeated tale. And it is certainly highly probable that newly arrived missionaries, whether men or women, cannot pronounce the name of the place they are going to, nor even at first remember it. But there seemed some sound common sense in what an elder missionary said the other day: "Youth enables women to bear many hardships, under which they would break down in later life. And youthful enthusiasm carries many a young missionary over the first two years of Chinese life, where a woman of forty could not bear the change of climate and food. Besides, if, as is most likely, they become the wives of missionaries, there is a far more reasonable hope of a happy married life when the wife is already well accustomed to China and its ways before undertaking the cares and duties of a wife, than when she is brought out fresh from England and has to face all together."
However, Shanghai so far keeps up its old character for gallantry, that it never has a word to say against the lady missionaries, unless sometimes in a grumbling tone: "Did you ever really see a pretty one?" But, then, every one has. Captains speak rather sorrowfully of this, that, and the other who came out with them. And young men who go to church (young Shanghai does go to church a little; it is the men past their prime who only "have seats"),--young Shanghai speaks sentimentally of some fair apparition who looked so lovely in loose-fitting white and blue, and begins to question whether Chinese dress is not, after all, the most becoming. Certainly, fair hair looks all the fairer and softer above the loose-fitting clothes more generally associated with coarsest black.