But here let me record my first great disappointment, because it may be that of many another. Brown mud is the first thing one sees of China. Brown mud accompanies the traveller for miles along the Yangtse River, all along the Peiho, up to brown and muddy Tientsin, and on up to Peking itself. China generally is not at all like the willow-pattern plate. I do not know if I really had expected it to be blue and white; but it was a disappointment to find it so very brown and muddy.
It was dull and leaden all the six hundred miles up the great river Yangtse; and at first it poured nearly all day and every day at Hankow, and we shivered over fires. Nevertheless, in spite of absolutely leaden skies and never a glimpse of sunshine, the coolies and the twenty-years-in-China-and-don't-speak-a-word-of-the-language men wore sun-hats, and pretended to get ill from the glare, when any one fresh from England would certainly say it was the damp. The floods were all the while advancing on what looked like a beleaguered city, when we went out on the plain outside, and gazed back at the city wall, with its dark water-line clearly marked all round close to the top.
The country round certainly did not tempt one to go out very often on to the rotten flag-stoned way by which one walked three or four miles in order to reach a one-mile distance as the crow flies, feeble-looking corn and marsh at either side, with an occasional tandem of buffaloes groaning not in unison with the discordant creaking of the cart they drew. Yet we plodded past the little homesteads, each planted on its own artificial hill, faced with stones on the side the floods come from. The very friendly people all used to come out of their cottages, and call out, "Do rest with us awhile," "Come in, do, and have some tea"; but till I spoke a little more Chinese, I did not care to repeat this often: though I rather enjoyed the first time going in and having tea, delicious tea, brought us at once--next a pipe, and then a bowl of water. Nothing could be friendlier than the people; and somehow or other I used to fancy from the first I held quite conversations with them. But what we either of us said to each other in words it is impossible to tell; there is so much one understands without knowing the words. So on and on we used to plod, resisting all kindly pressure to turn in, till gradually the reflection of the setting sun gave a red glow to the water in the ruts, and frogs hopped in numbers across the path, and bats whirled after mosquitoes. Then at last by an effort we summoned up will enough to turn, and plod just exactly the same way over the selfsame stones back to Hankow, the beleaguered city, with its avenues of over-arching willows, and beautiful Bund half a mile long--a mile walk up and down, therefore, as every one takes care to tell you the first day you arrive, as if afraid lest, stricken by a sort of midsummer madness, you should actually leave the English settlement, with its willows and its villas, and attempt to penetrate into the Chinese town.