The strolling doctor's profession, which is the last resort of the dissipated Bohemian literary man, is in some respects a picturesque and amusing method of getting a living. A book could be well written on this one subject alone, and if it were composed by one who could enter heartily into the spirit of the thing, it would be a most entertaining and amusing one. There is no doubt but that one would get from it a most realistic picture of the common life of the Chinese such as has never yet been written. The humorous and the grotesque would abound in it, and tragedy and comedy would follow each other in rapid succession as the experiences of these flotsam and jetsam of human society were recorded in it. Men write ponderous tomes upon China that generally are insufferably dry, and that give the West an idea that the Chinaman is an absurd, bizarre kind of individual, and that the main features about him are a pigtail and a pair of chopsticks. The fact of the matter is, he is brimful of wit and humour, and is just packed with as much human nature as one would meet with in any other part of the world. If the Chinese could only jump to the idea of having a Punch of their own it would be so filled with jokes and witticisms, though Oriental ones, that not even the famous English weekly would be able to surpass it for true wit and humour.
The next professional that I shall try to depict is the public story-teller. This man, as in the case of the strolling doctor, is almost always a man with a certain amount of talent, and with a literary cast of mind that has inclined him to study the ancient writings of China, but more particularly those that deal with fiction and romance. The literature of China is particularly rich in works of this latter description, and those who are fond of exciting adventures and hairbreadth escapes, and dark and mysterious plots, will find a large field in the countless models that have come down from the past for their satisfaction and entertainment.
A man sometimes becomes so saturated with the stories he has read that he feels himself competent to entertain a crowd, whilst he describes in a graphic and realistic manner the men and women that are depicted in some famous novel. Few men do this, however, unless they are driven by hard necessity; for a story-teller, though popular with the masses, is not held in high respect, but is looked upon as a man who has failed in the more respectable walks of life, and has taken to this simply because it is the only way left him by which he can lead a lazy, indolent life, and earn just enough to supply him with opium and the small amount of daily food that his opium-drenched system will allow him to take.