CHAPTER XIII - UP-COUNTRY SHOPPING AND UP-COUNTRY WAYS

Summary

Before Chinese New Year bargains are to be picked up—in Shanghai lovely embroidered satins, exquisite transparent tortoiseshell boxes, or china of the Ming period. Up-country our buyings are of a different order—a tiger-skin thirteen feet from head to tail, with grand markings, though of course not so thick a fur as is to be had at Newchwang. Head and tail and claws are all intact; and the man who brings it exhibits also its terrible jaws, and points to the holes where the spear entered before the man conquered the tiger. We have besides stone slabs, with the shells of the orthoceras embedded in them, sawn asunder and polished for screens or table-tops. What that most remarkable animal did, with a shell like the horn of an unicorn, not uncommonly over two feet long, and beautifully convoluted, it is hard to think. These pagoda-stones, as they are called, arrive in mass, all to realise money for New Year's debts.

Rocks of various kinds are the special product of the Ichang district, where we could supply all the rockeries of Shanghai with disintegrated conglomerate. Only, unfortunately, at this season fern-stones are not in sufficient beauty to play the part of the Irish pig, and help to pay the rent. But one day an eagle was shown into the drawing-room in splendid condition, with grand yellow beak, and beautiful brown eyes, and neck of blended tints of brown and bronze.