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“You speak true words,” I said, “but what do you like best in England?”

“The gardens,” he answered, “and the little yellow flowers that are sprinkled like stars on your green grass.”

“And what do you like least in England?”

“The horrible smells,” he said.

“Have you no smells in China?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied, “we have natural smells, but not the smell of gas and smoke and coal which sickens me here. It is strange to me that people can find the smell of human beings disgusting and be able to stand the foul stenches of a London street. This very road along which we are now travelling (we were passing through one of the less beautiful portions of the tramway line) makes me homesick for my country. I long to see a Chinese village once more built of mud and fenced with mud, muddy-roaded and muddy-baked, with a muddy little stream to be waded across or passed by stepping on stones; with a delicate one-storeyed temple on the water-eaten bank, and green poppy fields round it; and the women in dark blue standing at the doorways, smoking their pipes; and the children, with three small budding pigtails on the head of each, clinging to them; and the river fringed with a thousand masts: the boats, the houseboats, the barges and the ships in the calm, wide estuaries, each with a pair of huge eyes painted on the front bow. And the people: the men working at their looms and whistling a happy tune out of the gladness of their hearts. And everywhere the sense of leisure, the absence of hurry and bustle and confusion; the dignity of manners and the grace of expression and of address. And, above all, the smell of life everywhere.”

“I admit,” I said, “that our streets smell horribly of smoke and coal, but surely our people are clean?”

“Yes,” he said, “no doubt; but you forget that to us there is nothing so intolerably nasty as the smell of a clean white man!”