Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 23, February, 1873

The deepening twilight was producing chilliness. I flooded the room with brilliant light, stirred the grate into glowing warmth, and invited him to a seat near the fire.

"You will not leave me, will you? This may be—it will be—my last demand on you as a confidante. How is the bouquet progressing?" he asked.

"See," I said, holding my embroidery up before me: "we must hurry. I have but one more tendril to add."

"Tendrils are clinging things, like hope, are they not?" he said pensively.

But sentimentalizing was not the business of the hour, and I intimated as much to him. "Yes," I replied, "but hope must now give place to effort. I see you are not going to take my 'give-her-up' advice."

"No—only from her who has the right to give it."

I now considered my patient out of danger.

"Then why do you torture yourself longer with doubts? Perhaps your irresolution has caused a want of confidence in the strength of your affection. At least give her an opportunity to define her true position toward you. Beard the lions of indifference and friendship in their dens, and do not yield to unmanly cowardice. Strange that I have given you the counsel last which should have been given first! But do not, I beseech you, lose any time in seeking her. Assure her of your long and unwavering devotion. Constancy is the most valued word in a true woman's vocabulary. You have staked too much happiness to lose: you must win."

"And if I lose," he said—holding up something before him which I took to be a picture, though it was in the shape of a heart—"and if I lose, then perish all of earth to me. But leave me only this, and should I hold you thus, and gaze on what I have first and last and only loved until this perishable material on which I have placed you turn to dust, still will you be graven on a heart whose deathless love can know no death; for a thing so holy as the love I bear you was not made to die."

My work—now my completed work—dropped beneath my fingers, for the last stitch was taken.

If I could not prevent his self-torture, he should not, at least, torture me longer; and snatching the thing from his grasp, I exclaimed as I closed my hands over it, "Now, before I return it, you must, you shall, promise me that you will take the last advice I gave you; or will you allow me to look at it, and then unseal the silent lips and give you the prophetic little 'yes' or 'no' which a professed physiognomist like your confidante can always read in the eye?"

"I would rather you did the last," he said; and I rose, leaned my elbow on the corner of the mantel nearest the gaslight, rested my head on my empty hand, so as to shade my eyes from the intensity of the brilliant burner near me, and with the awe creeping over me with which the old astrologers read the horoscope of the midnight stars, I looked, and saw—only a wonderfully faithful copy of the portrait hanging just over me, of which Mr. Tennent Tremont's confidante was the original. I threw it from me, and burst into tears. He stood quite near me. I thought I hated him, but my obtuse, blundering, idiotic self more than him. I waved my hand in token either of his silence or withdrawal, for in all my life long I, with a whole dictionary in my mind of abusive epithets, was never more at a loss for a word. My token was unheeded.

He only murmured softly,

"I had never seen thee weeping:
I cannot leave thee now.

When you snatched my picture from me a moment ago I saw a glistening tear of sympathy in your eye; but what are these?"

"So cruel! so ungenerous! so unfair!" I said, still pressing my hands tightly over my eyes. "How can I ever forgive you?"

With softer murmur than the last he repeated the words,

"'Tis sweet to let the pardoned in."

"Astounding presumption that!" I said, now giving him the benefit of my full gaze—"to speak of pardon before making a confession of your guilt! But before I give you time even for that, the remaining mysteries which still hang around your tale of woe shall be cleared up. Please to inform the court how the original of your purloined sketch could have been the object of years of devotion, when it has been only four weeks to-day since you laid your mortal eyes on her?"

"Ah! you may well say mortal; but you know the soul too has its visual organs. I saw and loved and worshiped my ideal in those years, and sought her too—how unceasingly!—and I said,

Only for the real will I with the ideal part:
Another shall not even tempt my heart.

When I saw her just four weeks since, I knew her,

And my heart responded as, with unseen wings,
An angel touched its unswept strings,
And whispers in its song,
Where hast thou strayed so long?"

But the avenging demon of curiosity was not to be exorcised by sentimental evasion: "Those letters, sir, of which you spoke, they must have been of a real, tangible form—not a part of the mythical phantasmagoria of your idealistic vision."

He laughed as a light-hearted child would, but knitted his brow with a perplexed air as he said, "Why don't the British government send a woman to find the source of the Nile? I must thank your unsophisticated brother's pride in his sister's epistolary accomplishments for my privilege of perusal. What next?"

I thought a moment. Before, I had fifty other queries to propound, but now as I looked into the glowing anthracite before me which gave us those pleasant Reveries, they very naturally all resolved themselves into explained mysteries without his aid.

He insists that the "prophetic little yes or no" never came.

Upon my honor, dear reader, as a confidante, I still think it the most unfair procedure which ever "disgraced the annals of civilized warfare;" but I shall have abundant opportunity for revenge, for we are to make the journey of life together.

GLIMPSES OF JOHN CHINAMAN

When John Marshall picked up the first golden nugget in California, a call was sounded for the gathering of an immense gold-seeking army made up of many nationalities; and among the rest China sent a battalion some fifty thousand strong.

John Chinaman has remained with us ever since, despised and abused, being neither a co-worshiper nor a co-sympathizer in aught save the getting of gold. In dress, custom and language his is still a nationality as distinct from ours as are the waters of the Gulf Stream from those of the ocean.

It is possible that this may be but the second migration of Tartars to the American shore. It is possible that the North American Indian and the Chinaman may be identical in origin and race. Close observers find among the aboriginal tribes resident far up on the north-west American coast peculiar habits and customs, having closely-allied types among the Chinese. The features of the Aleuts, the natives of the Aleutian Islands, are said to approximate closely to those of the Mongolians. The unvarying long black hair, variously-shaded brown skin, beardless face and shaven head are points, natural and artificial, common to the Indian and Mongolian. There is a hint of common custom between the Indian scalplock and Chinese cue.

"John" has been a thorough gleaner of the mines. The "superior race" allowed him to make no valuable discoveries. He could buy their half-worked-out placers. The "river-bed" they sold him when its chances of yielding were deemed desperate. When the golden fruitage of the banks was reduced to a dollar per day, they became "China diggings." But wherever "John" settled he worked steadily, patiently and systematically, no matter whether his ten or twelve hours' labor brought fifty cents or fifty dollars; for his industry is of an untiring mechanical character. In the earlier and flusher days of California's gold-harvest the white man worked spasmodically. He was ever leaving the five-dollar diggings in hand for the fifty- or hundred-dollar-per-day claims afar off in some imaginary bush. These golden rumors were always on the wing. The country was but half explored, and many localities were rich in mystery. The white vanguard pushed north, south and east, frequently enduring privation and suffering. "John," in comparative comfort, trotted patiently after, carrying his snugly made-up bundle of provisions and blankets at one end of a bamboo pole, his pick, shovel, pan and rocker at the other, to work over the leavings. The leavings sometimes turned out more gold than "new ground," much to the chagrin of the impatient Caucasian. But John, according to his own testimony, never owned a rich claim. Ask him how much it yielded per day, and he would tell you, "sometimes four, sometimes six bittee" (four or six shillings). He had many inducements for prevarication. Nearly every white man's hand was against him. If he found a bit of rich ground, "jumpers" were ready to drive him from it: Mexicans waylaid him and robbed him of his dust. In remote localities he enclosed his camp by strong stockades: even these were sometimes forced and carried at night by bands of desperadoes. Lastly came the foreign miner's tax-collector, with his demand of four dollars monthly per man for the privilege of digging gold. There were hundreds and thousands of other foreign laborers in the mines—English, German, French, Italian and Portuguese—but they paid little or none of this tax, for they might soon be entitled to a vote, and the tax-collector was appointed by the sheriff of the county, and the sheriff, like other officials, craved a re-election. But John was never to be a voter, and so he shouldered the whole of this load, and when he could not pay, the official beat him and took away his tools. John often fought this persecutor by strategy. In localities where no white men would betray him he signalized his coming from afar. From the crags of Red Mountain on the Tuolumne River I have often seen the white flag waved as the dreaded collector came down the steep trail to collect his monthly dues. That signal or a puff of smoke told the Chinese for miles along the river-valley to conceal themselves from the "license-man." Rockers, picks and shovels were hastily thrust into clumps of chapparal, and their owners clambered up the hillsides into artificial caves or leafy coverts. Out of companies of fifty the collector finds but twenty men at work. These pay their tax, the official rides on down the river, the hidden thirty Mongolians emerge from cover; and more than once has a keen collector "doubled on them" by coming back unexpectedly and detecting the entire gang on their claim.

John has been invaluable to the California demagogue, furnishing for him a sop of hatred and prejudice to throw before "enlightened constituencies." It needs but to mention the "filthy Chinaman" to provoke an angry roar from the mass-meeting. Yet the Chinaman is not entirely filthy. He washes his entire person every day when practicable; he loves clean clothes; his kitchen-utensils will bear inspection. When the smallpox raged so severely in San Francisco a few years since, there were very few deaths among his race. But John is not nice about his house. He seems to have none of our ideas concerning home comfort. Smoke has no terror for him; soap he keeps entirely for his clothes and person; floor-and wall-washing are things never hinted at; and the refuse of his table is scarcely thrown out of doors. Privacy is not one of his luxuries—he wants a house full: where there is room for a bunk, there is room for a man. An anthill, a beehive, a rabbit-warren are his models of domestic comfort: what is stinted room for two Americans is spaciousness for a dozen Chinese. Go into one of their cabins at night, and you are in an oven full of opium- and lamp-smoke. Recumbent forms are dimly seen lying on bunks above and below. The chattering is incessant. Stay there ten minutes, and as your eye becomes accustomed to the smoke you will dimly see blue bundles lying on shelves aloft. Anon the bundles stir, talk and puff smoke. Above is a loft six feet square: a ladder brings it in communication with the ground floor. Mongolians are ever coming down, but the gabble of tongues above shows that a host is still left. Like an omnibus, a Chinese house is never full. Nor is it ever quiet. At all hours of the night may be heard their talk and the clatter of their wooden shoes. A Chinaman does not retire like an American, intending to make a serious business of his night's sleeping. He merely "lops down" half dressed, and is ready to arise at the least call of business or pleasure.

While at work in his claim his fire is always kindled near by, and over it a tea-pot. This is his beverage every half hour. His tea must be hot, strong and without milk or sugar. He also consumes a terrible mixture sold him by white traders, called indiscriminately brandy, gin or whisky, yet an intoxicated Chinaman is the rarest of rare sights. Rice he can cook elegantly, every grain being steamed to its utmost degree of distension. Soup he makes of no other meat than pork. The poorest among his hordes must have a chicken or duck for his holiday. He eats it merely parboiled. He will eat dog also, providing it is not long past maturity.

The Chinese grocery-stores are museums to the American. There are strange dried roots, strange dried fish, strange dried land and marine plants, ducks and chickens, split, pressed thin and smoked; dried shellfish; cakes newly made, yellow, glutinous and fatty, stamped with tea-box characters; and great earthen jars filled with rottenness. I speak correctly if perhaps too forcibly, for when those imposing jars are opened to serve a customer with some manner of vegetable cut in long strips, the native-born American finds it expedient to hold his nose. American storekeepers in the mines deal largely in Chinese goods. They know the Mongolian names of the articles inquired for, but of their character, their composition, how they are cooked or how eaten, they can give no information. It is heathenish "truck," by whose sale they make a profit. Only that and nothing more.

A Chinese miner's house is generally a conglomeration of old boards, mats, brush, canvas and stones. Rusty sheets of tin sometimes help to form the edifice. Anything lying about loose in the neighborhood is certain in time to form a part of the Mongolian mansion.

When the white man abandons mining-ground he often leaves behind very serviceable frame houses. John comes along to glean the gold left by the Caucasian. He builds a cluster of shapeless huts. The deserted white man's house gradually disappears. A clapboard is gone, and then another, and finally all. The skeleton of the frame remains: months pass away; piece by piece the joists disappear; some morning they are found tumbled in a heap, and at last nothing is left save the cellar and chimneys. Meantime, John's clusters of huts swell their rude proportions, but you must examine them narrowly to detect any traces of your vanished house, for he revels in smoke, and everything about him is soon colored to a hue much resembling his own brownish-yellow countenance. Thus he picks the domiciliary skeleton bare, and then carries off the bones. He is a quiet but skillful plunderer. John No. 1 on his way home from his mining-claim rips off a board; John No. 2 next day drags it a few yards from the house. John No. 3 a week afterward drags it home. In this manner the dissolution of your house is protracted for months. In this manner he distributes the responsibility of the theft over his entire community. I have seen a large boarding-house disappear in this way, and when the owner, after a year's absence, revisited the spot to look after his property, he found his real estate reduced to a cellar.

John himself is a sort of museum in his character and habits. We must be pardoned for giving details of these, mingled promiscuously, rather after the museum style. His New Year comes in February. For the Chinaman of limited means it lasts a week, for the wealthy it may endure three. His consumption of fire-crackers during that period is immense. He burns strings a yard in length suspended from poles over his balconies. The uproar and sputtering consequent on this festivity in the Chinese quarter at San Francisco is tremendous. The city authorities limit this Celestial Pandemonium to a week.

He does not forsake the amusement of kite-flying even when arrived at maturity. His artistic imitations of birds and dragons float over our housetops. To these are often affixed contrivances for producing hollow, mournful, buzzing sounds, mystifying whole neighborhoods. His game of shuttlecock is to keep a cork, one end being stuck with feathers, flying in the air as long as possible, the impelling member being the foot, the players standing in a circle and numbering from four to twenty. Some show great dexterity in kicking with the heel. His vocal music to our ears seems a monotonous caterwaul. His violin has but one string: his execution is merely a modified species of saw-filing.

He loves to gamble, especially in lotteries. He is a diligent student of his own comfort. Traveling on foot during a hot day, he protects himself with an umbrella and refreshes himself with a fan. In place of prosaic signs on his store-fronts, he often inscribes quotations from his favorite authors.

He is a lover of flowers. His balconies and window-sills are often thickly packed with shrubs and creepers in pots. He is not a speedy and taciturn eater. His tea-table talks are full of noisy jollity, and are often prolonged far into the night.

He is a lover of the drama. A single play sometimes requires months for representation, being, like a serial story, "continued" night after night. He never dances. There is no melody in the Mongolian foot. Dancing he regards as a species of Caucasian insanity.

To make an oath binding he must swear by the head of a cock cut off before him in open court. Chinese testimony is not admissible in American courts. It is a legal California axiom that a Chinaman cannot speak the truth. But cases have occurred wherein, he being an eye-witness, the desire to hear what he might tell as to what he had seen has proved stronger than the prejudice against him; and the more effectually to clinch the chances of his telling the truth, the above, his national form of oath, has been resorted to. He has among us some secret government of his own. Before his secret tribunals more than one Mongolian has been hurried in Star-Chamber fashion, and never seen afterward. The nature of the offences thus visited by secret and bloody punishment is scarcely known to Americans. He has two chief deities—a god and a devil. Most of his prayers are offered to his devil. His god, he says, being good and well-disposed, it is not necessary to propitiate him. But his devil is ugly, and must be won over by offering and petition. Once a year, wherever collected in any number, he builds a flimsy sort of temple, decorates it with ornaments of tinsel, lays piles of fruit, meats and sugared delicacies on an altar, keeps up night and day a steady crash of gongs, and installs therein some great, uncouth wooden idols. When this period of worship is over the "josh-house" disappears, and the idols are unceremoniously stowed away among other useless lumber.

He shaves with an instrument resembling a butcher's cleaver in miniature. Nature generally denies him beard, so he shaves what a sailor would term the fore and after part of his head. He reaps his hirsute crop dry, using no lather. His cue is pieced out by silken braid, so interwoven as gradually to taper into a slim tassel, something like a Missouri mule-driver's "black snake" whip-lash. To lose this cue is to lose caste and standing among his fellows. No misfortune for him can be greater.

Coarse cowhide boots are the only articles of American wear that he favors. He inclines to buy the largest sizes, thinking he thereby gets the most for his money, and when his No. 7 feet wobble and chafe in No. 12 boots he complains that they "fit too much."

He cultivates the vegetables of his native land in California. They are curiosities like himself. One resembles our string-bean, but is circular in shape and from two to three feet in length. It is not in the least stringy, breaks off short and crisp, boils tender very quickly and affords excellent eating. He is a very careful cultivator, and will spend hours picking off dead leaves and insects from the young plants. When he finds a dead cat, rat, dog or chicken, he throws it into a small vat of water, allows it to decompose, and sprinkles the liquid fertilizer thus obtained over his plantation. Watermelon and pumpkin seeds are for him dessert delicacies. He consumes his garden products about half cooked in an American culinary point of view, merely wilting them by an immersion in boiling water.

There are about fifteen English words to be learned by a Chinaman on arriving in California, and no more. With these he expresses all his wants, and with this limited stock you must learn to convey all that is needful to him. The practice thus forced upon one in employing a Chinese servant is useful in preventing a circumlocutory habit of speech. Many of our letters the Mongolian mouth has no capacity for sounding. R he invariably sounds like l, so that the word "rice" he pronounces "lice"—a bit of information which may prevent an unpleasant apprehension when you come to employ a Chinese cook. He rejects the English personal pronoun I, and uses the possessive "my" in its place; thus, "My go home," in place of "I go home."