164
WEI PEH T'I
You one when I get them.45
Edith managed to get away from Taiho twice during the little more than three years she was corresponding with Louese. She described her journey to a nearby station twenty-three miles away.
We could not get boats all the week and were finally forced to go by wheel-barrow to get there at all. That is the usual mode of travel and very comfortable, but fearfully slow. We put our box on for a back and then our bed, then we sit on it with our feet out over the wheel. These barrowmen are accustomed to pushing between four and five hundred pounds so we count a light-load and all the pay they get is ten cents a day. We always pay for their return trip too, making 20 cents, and a tip if they have pleased us. Wherever we go we take our bed with us, that is a cotton wadding mattress and our bedding and quite understand now the meaning of “take up thy bed and walk.”46
Edith had hoped to go to Wuhu in March 1905 to attend the Provincial Conference, to see the dentist and just to get away from Taiho. It was not clear whether she ever took the trip because "Mrs. Ferguson wants me to hasten and be back in plenty of time as she expects to be confined in June.”47 Edith had been complaining about her suffering from a very bad cold and general fatigue in this and an earlier letter. So, perhaps, instead of Wuhu, she went on a holiday in Shanghai and Chinkiang instead. As she told Louese when she wrote next, in April 1906:
My holiday was not the rest it should have been, only consisting of two weeks at Shanghai and Chinkiang. But I was a month on the way down by native boat and a month back.48
Shanghai and Chinkiang, and even Wuhu, represented a change from Taiho for Edith. She could be with English-speaking people who were not the Fergusons, and could relish the “custom (of using) tablecloth and knives and forks. . . (of the) extravagant (?) foreigners" which she had missed.