"Well, not so you could notice it," responded Ralph, as the awful smells of the waterside forced themselves on their unwilling nostrils.
They speedily reached the shore and handed double fare to the parchment-faced boatman, who chattered volubly.
"What do you suppose he's saying?" asked Tom.
"Heaven knows," returned Ralph; "thanking us, probably. And yet he may be cursing us as 'foreign devils,' and consigning us to perdition. That's one of the advantages of speaking in the toughest language on earth for an outsider to master."
"It is fierce, isn't it?" assented Bert. "I've heard that it takes about seven years of the hardest kind of study to learn to speak or read it, and even then you can't do it any too well. Some simply can't learn it at all."
"Well," said Tom, "I can't conceive of any worse punishment than to have to listen to it, let alone speak it. Good old United States for mine."
At the outset they found themselves in the English quarter. It was a splendid section of the city, with handsome buildings and well-kept streets, and giving eloquent testimony to the colonizing genius of the British empire. Here England had entrenched herself firmly, and from this as a point of departure, her long arm stretched out to the farthest limits of the Celestial Kingdom. She had made the place a modern Gibraltar, dominating the waters of the East as its older prototype held sway over the Mediterranean. Everywhere there were evidences of the law and order and regulated liberty that always accompany the Union Jack, and that explains why a little island in the Western Ocean rules a larger part of the earth's surface than any other power.
"We've certainly got to hand it to the English," said Ralph. "They're the worst hated nation in Europe, and yet as colonizers the whole world has to take off its hat to them. Look at Egypt and India and Canada and Australia and a score of smaller places. No wonder that Webster was impressed by it when he spoke of the 'drum-beat that, following the sun and keeping pace with the hours, encircled the globe with the martial airs of England.'"
"It's queer, too, why it is so," mused Bert. "If they were specially genial and adaptable, you could understand it. But, as a rule, they're cold and arrogant and distant, and they don't even try to get in touch with the people they rule. Now the French are far more sympathetic and flexible, but, although they have done pretty well in Algiers and Tonquin and Madagascar, they don't compare with the British as colonizers."