THREE:And now in his fiftieth year he was as friendless outside his home as he was companionless there. The years during which friendships can be made, that is to say, from boyhood up till about the age of forty, had passed for him in a practically incessant effort of building up the immense business which was his own property. And even if he had not been so employed, it is doubtful whether he would ever have made friends. Partly a certain stark austerity innate in him would have kept{38} intimacy at a distance, partly he had never penetrated into circles at Bracebridge where he would have met his intellectual equals. Till now Keeling of the fish-shop had but expanded into Mr Keeling, proprietor of the Universal Stores, that reared such lofty terra-cotta cupolas in the High Street, and the men he met, those with whom he habitually came in contact, he met on purely business grounds, and they would have felt as little at ease in the secret atmosphere of his library as he would have been in entertaining them there. They looked up to him as the shrewdest as well as the richest of the prosperous tradesmen of Bracebridge, and his contributions and suggestions at the meetings of the Town Council were received with the respect that their invariable common sense merited. But there their intercourse terminated; he could not conceive what was the pleasure of hitting a golf-ball over four miles of downland, and faced with blank incomprehension the fact that those who had been exercising their brains all day in business should sit up over games of cards to find themselves richer or poorer by a couple of pounds at one o��clock in the morning. He would willingly have drawn a cheque for such a sum in order to be permitted to go to bed at eleven as usual. He had no notion of sport in any form, neither had he the bonhomie, the pleasure in the company of cheerful human beings as such, which really lies at the root of the{39} pursuits which he so frankly despised, nor any zeal for the chatter of social intercourse. To him a glass of whisky and soda was no more than half a pint of effervescing fluid, which you were better without: it had to him no value or existence as a symbol of good fellowship. There was never a man less clubbable. But in spite of the bleakness of nature here indicated, and the severity of his aspect towards his fellow men, he had a very considerable fund of kindly impulses towards any who treated him with sincerity. An appeal for help, whether it implied the expenditure of time or money was certainly subjected to a strict scrutiny, but if it passed that, it was as certainly responded to. He was as reticent about such acts of kindness as he was about the pleasures of his secret garden, or the steady increase in his annual receipts from his stores. But all three gave him considerable satisfaction, and the luxury of giving was to him no whit inferior to that of getting.The captain went on to say that there were many pirates in the waters around Canton, and all along the southern coast. The government tries to suppress them, but it is not easy to do so, and hardly a day passes without the report of a robbery somewhere. All trading-junks are obliged to go heavily armed, and out of this fact comes a great deal of the piracy, as a junk may be a peaceful trader at one o'clock, a pirate at two, and a peaceful trader again at three. It takes very little to induce a Chinese captain to turn pirate when he sees a rich prize before him, and he has no trouble in winning over his crew. It is impossible to distinguish the pirate from the trader; and as the coast is seamed with island passages and indented with bays, it is easy for a junk to escape after she has committed a robbery.

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THREE:"Certainly, my child," was the reply; "he has been twice around the world, and has seen nearly every civilized and uncivilized country in it.[Pg 19] He speaks three or four languages fluently, and knows something of half a dozen others. Five years ago he was in Japan and China, and he is acquainted with many people living there. Don't you remember how he told us one evening about visiting a Japanese prince, and sitting cross-legged on the floor for half an hour, while they ate a dinner of boiled rice and stewed fish, and drank hot wine from little cups the size of a thimble?"

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THREE:"Good for you!" "It was vital for me. But I did it on evidence which our laws ignore, the testimony of slaves. Oh, General, don't try to untangle me; only stop him!"She went to the window and brought back her strip of pomegranates.

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