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His taciturnity and reticence may have been confounded with rudeness of address, although he was always civil enough. “I see you have listened to me and done exactly what I told you,” said a lady, commending some performance of her servant after a previous lengthy lecture; “that’s very nice.” “Yes,” said John calmly, “you talkee allee time; talkee allee too much.” “I always find Ling very polite,” said another lady, speaking of her cook, “but I wish he did not always say to me, ‘Goodnight, John,’ in a high falsetto voice.” She had not recognized the fact that he was simply repeating her own salutation with his marvelous instinct of relentless imitation, even as to voice. I hesitate to record the endless stories of his misapplication of that faculty which were then current, from the one of the laundryman who removed the buttons from the shirts that were sent to him to wash that they might agree with the condition of the one offered him as a pattern for “doing up,” to that of the unfortunate employer who, while showing John how to handle valuable china carefully, had the misfortune to drop a plate himself–an accident which was followed by the prompt breaking of another by the neophyte, with the addition of “Oh, hellee!” in humble imitation of his master.

I have spoken of his general cleanliness; I am reminded of one or two exceptions, which I think, however, were errors of zeal. His manner of sprinkling clothes in preparing them for ironing was peculiar. He would fill his mouth with perfectly pure water from a glass beside him, and then, by one dexterous movement of his lips in a prolonged expiration, squirt the water in an almost invisible misty shower on the article before him. Shocking as this was at first to the sensibilities of many American employers, it was finally accepted, and even commended. It was some time after this that the mistress of a household, admiring the deft way in which her cook had spread a white sauce on certain dishes, was cheerfully informed that the method was “allee same.”

His recreations at that time were chiefly gambling, for the Chinese theatre wherein the latter produced his plays (which lasted for several months and comprised the events of a whole dynasty) was not yet built. But he had one or two companies of jugglers who occasionally performed also at American theatres. I remember a singular incident which attended the debut of a newly arrived company. It seemed that the company had been taken on their Chinese reputation solely, and there had been no previous rehearsal before the American stage manager. The theatre was filled with an audience of decorous and respectable San Franciscans of both sexes. It was suddenly emptied in the middle of the performance; the curtain came down with an alarmed and blushing manager apologizing to deserted benches, and the show abruptly terminated. Exactly WHAT had happened never appeared in the public papers, nor in the published apology of the manager. It afforded a few days’ mirth for wicked San Francisco, and it was epigrammatically summed up in the remark that “no woman could be found in San Francisco who was at that performance, and no man who was not.” Yet it was alleged even by John’s worst detractors that he was innocent of any intended offense. Equally innocent, but perhaps more morally instructive, was an incident that brought his career as a singularly successful physician to a disastrous close. An ordinary native Chinese doctor, practicing entirely among his own countrymen, was reputed to have made extraordinary cures with two or three American patients. With no other advertising than this, and apparently no other inducement offered to the public than what their curiosity suggested, he was presently besieged by hopeful and eager sufferers. Hundreds of patients were turned away from his crowded doors. Two interpreters sat, day and night, translating the ills of ailing San Francisco to this medical oracle, and dispensing his prescriptions–usually small powders–in exchange for current coin. In vain the regular practitioners pointed out that the Chinese possessed no superior medical knowledge, and that their religion, which proscribed dissection and autopsies, naturally limited their understanding of the body into which they put their drugs. Finally they prevailed upon an eminent Chinese authority to give them a list of the remedies generally used in the Chinese pharmacopoeia, and this was privately circulated. For obvious reasons I may not repeat it here. But it was summed up–again after the usual Californian epigrammatic style–by the remark that “whatever were the comparative merits of Chinese and American practice, a simple perusal of the list would prove that the Chinese were capable of producing the most powerful emetic known.” The craze subsided in a single day; the interpreters and their oracle vanished; the Chinese doctors’ signs, which had multiplied, disappeared, and San Francisco awoke cured of its madness, at the cost of some thousand dollars.