Book Description

Excerpt from Wanderings in China You will wonder when you receive this letter posted in Hong-Kong, where I hope to arrive to-morrow! It is not that my four months in Japan have by any means exhausted its fascination, - on the contrary, I purpose returning there in spring, when the double cherry-blossoms are in their glory; but meanwhile the hills are white with snow, and I have been nearly frozen, living in paper houses, without fires - only such warmth as we could extract from ornamental little charcoal braziers. So I have fled southward with the swallows, and sailed from Nagasaki, intending to spend Christmas at Shanghai. There, however, I only stayed three days, for the horrid river of yellow mud and the hideousness of the flat country round, and, above all, notwithstanding the genuine kindness of several residents, the oppressive dreariness of finding myself alone in a great doll hotel, where there was not a creature to be seen except Chinese servants, depressed me to such a pitch, that I resolved to risk spending Christmas-day at sea rather than remain there. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.