180
WEI PEH T'I
very sticky mushy condition and Chinese shoes are not adapted to that, being only made of cotton cloth. Except we wear the wooden stilts like the men, like this π somewhat like skates.
We have had a pleasant Christmas, spent it at the next station, twenty-three miles from here, our nearest foreign neighbors. Mr. and Mrs. Barnett have just returned from furlough and they have a beautiful little baby girl one year and a half old. It was a pleasure to see her and hold her and she did look so pretty after the little yellow babies and so clean, which the yellow babies are not.
We meant to get there before them to get the place in readiness but 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 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”.
I think I told you Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm have been planning for some time to go on furlough and there did not seem to be anyone to send in their place. Now a Mr. and Mrs. Ferguson are coming with three children, the eldest one about six so in three weeks we will be a houseful. This place is very small, just enough room for we three and an occasional visitor and how to take in two grown-ups and three children is a problem. But the Malcolms may be leaving as soon as they arrive. The children will be a great blessing here, always such a help in breaking down prejudices, for the people then think we are more like themselves. They cannot understand single women away from home in a strange place. I am generally accepted as Mrs. Malcolm's inferior wife. I got over feeling badly about it, as it is quite right in their eyes, and much better than for me to be living alone, for then I would have a bad name.