Little Folk of Many Lands

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1899 Excerpt: ...from his eyes alone. They are so narrow that they look as if they were peeping out at the world through slits that had been made in the buff parchment of O Man's face--made with one stroke of a very sharp knife. Mr. O, the highborn but sonless gentleman that adopted O Man, is very wealthy, and he had a scamp of a nephew named Tee Sin, who had hoped to be adopted by the rich old man, for Tee Sin's father was poor and had many sons. Mr. O loved his sister, Mrs. Tee. He sent her red lacquer boxes of stuffs and rich drawers, and jackets and skins; he sent her whole pigs and roast fowls, and trays of sweetmeats and big packets of superior tea, and many honorific and complimentary messages every New Year's morning; and he did many other things in a delicate way, to help his less well-to-do sister and her many children. But he never had any intention of adopting her good-for-nothing son, Sin. And Tee Sin, when O Man was adopted instead, was very much astonished and felt outraged and vicious, as people are apt to do in China, and elsewhere, when they fail to get what they have never in the least deserved, or even tried to deserve. So Tee Sin started the ugly story that O Man was at least an eighth English (and missionary English at that!), and quite unfit to worship at the ancestral tablets of the great O family. This so enraged Mr. O that he regretted having only the month before shown his sister (Sin's mother) the delicate attention of presenting her with an elaborate, handsome, and very costly coffin. It was an article so A SUMPTUOUS, BARBARIC PAGEANT 195 exceptionally handsome--even in China, where the fine and solemn art of coffin-making and coffin-ornamentation is studied and practised with a care and zeal unknown in other parts of the world--that it excited ...