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Updated: May 10, 2025
The bearers set me down at the gate of the Yamun among the festering wretches dragging the heavy weights, the filthy and noisy beggars, the gamblers, the fortune-tellers, the messengers of justice, and the countless hangers-on of the prison and judgment-seat of the Naam-Hoi magistrate, and passing through a part of the courtyard, and down a short, narrow passage, enclosed by a door of rough wooden uprights, above which is a tiger's head, with staring eyes and extended jaws, we reached the inner entrance, close to which is a much blackened altar of incense foul with the ashes of innumerable joss-sticks, and above it an equally blackened and much worn figure of a tiger in granite.
This boat was fairly comfortable from a Chinese point of view, having benches on either side of the cabin and a kind of platform at the back, with a small, low table thereon bearing the customary incense-burner, containing fragrant joss-sticks, and also on this occasion a small joss or gilt image of Buddha, which Chin always took with him on his wanderings.
One glimpse was enough for me. From this place we entered the temple. One of our guides said he was obliged to buy joss-sticks and kneel before the gods or it would make us trouble, because they are watchful of what foreigners do. They consider us white devils. We saw a war god nine feet high mounted on a war steed one foot high, a child's woolly toy.
In this passionless subservience to the principles of the Order none exceeded him; yet at no time have men been forbidden to burn joss-sticks to the spirit of the destinies, and who shall say? One day he was summoned before the chief of their company and a mission laid upon him. "You have proved yourself to be capable and sincere in the past, and this matter is one of delicacy," said the leader.
Just as brandy and soda, and peach brandy, are amber-colored, so are Scotch high-balls, which you and Pennington Lawton were drinking. No odor of peaches lingered about the room, for Miss Lawton had lighted a handful of joss-sticks in a vase upon the mantel earlier in the evening, and their pungent perfume filled the air.
This is hung up at the entrance of the mourners' houses, while they offer oblations and burn joss-sticks. Food is also prepared and laid out, in case the spirit of the departed, finding the journey to the regions of the 'kamis' a long and wearisome one, should need refreshment.
Do you know, old man, I feel as though we're getting away just in the nick of time. My back hair and the pricking of my thumbs warn me that your dearly beloved spooks are combining to put up some sort of a spooking job on us. I hope Yee Kee has a plentiful supply of joss-sticks to stand 'em off, if they get too busy while we are gone."
There are no windows to these strange conveyances, in which the bride is carried to her future home, closely shut up, with joss-sticks burning in front of her. Recently there have been two sad accidents. In one case the journey was long, there was no outlet for the smoke of the joss-sticks, and when they arrived and opened the chair, the bride was found dead from suffocation.
She shows her admirably preserved teeth in a little grin of sardonic contempt "nearly a year after your marriage. Don't tell me your husband let you go on burning joss-sticks to Beau's angelic memory when he might have made you spit on it by telling you the truth!" Lynette's lip curls, and she lifts her little head proudly. "He never once hinted at the truth. Nor was it through him I learned it!"
There is no rest either by night or day, joss-sticks burn incessantly, and lamps before the ancestral tablets, gongs are beaten, gingalls fire incessantly, and great crackers like cartridges fastened together in rows are let off at intervals before every door to frighten away evil spirits; there are family banquets of wearisome length, feasts to the household gods, offerings in the temples, processions in the street by torch and lantern light, presents are given to the living, and offerings to the dead, the poor are feasted, and the general din is heightened by messengers perambulating the streets with gongs, calling them to the different banquets.
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