46
Letter from B. J. Bettelheim.
JAN.
The aggravation of the case lay in the circumstance that we are foreigners, which, as some told me, makes our money to be considered as our life; for as we can not earn any more, we must starve to death without it. Others again told me, the case is considered as a betrayal against the fatherland, which by so grave an offence against a foreign- er might have been exposed to great difficulties, and perhaps summary reprisals. Either view made me extremely uneasy regarding the fate awaiting the culprits. I was therefore greatly relieved by the above dispatch, and no less amused with the punctiliousness of this miniature government on their judicial power, and the impatience manifested at my talking to them of English law. Peace being thus patched up after a fashion, government even thought of getting me again to a pub- lic dinner, intimating they wished thereby to show the nation that our differences were all settled. But on this very ground I was obliged to refuse, alledging that I wished the people still to understand I was grieved at their being forbidden access to me, while neither did I feel at liberty to forget the transaction on the public road near Shui, till a straightforward apology had been given.
Had there been a shadow of sincerity under all this parade of restor- ed goodwill, I should immediately have felt it in my labors. But there, the only quarter to which I looked for evidence of the worth of these doubtful promises and ambiguous professions of friendship, all remained as dark and cloudy as before; not a single breeze sprang up in the right direction, and consequently, I had to go on in my old hard and toil- some way. I now began more steadily to visit the huts where my guard lived, and particularly that one nearest my door, to which, I think, twenty men belonged, four of them serving by turns each day, and the whole set changed about twice in a year. Here then I had annually forty immortal souls, to whom access could not easily be denied me; for even when the guards in the other huts were ordered all to leave as soon as I entered, such rudeness could not be ventured upon at my house-door, where I could threaten to remove the whole hut, in case the inmates behaved impolitely. Difficulties, however, were constantly raised, and when I absolutely insisted upon their keeping several of my books in the hut, that they might have something better than cards and dice to beguile the time with, it came nigh to having a rupture. I maintained that this hut formed part of my residence, and I would not be forbidden to keep the books of Jesus there. In a country where written charms are much in vogue, and strange immunities are attri- buted to scribbled slips pasted on doors and walls, perhaps they took, and may still take my deference for our Scriptures and tracts as some-