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Updated: June 10, 2025
The water in the labyrinth of channels between the mangroves was thick and discoloured; there was not a breath of air, the heat was unbearable, and the whole place steamed with decay and disease. Yet somehow the scene seemed very familiar, for one had read of it, again and again, in a hundred boys' books. The same mental process was at work both in myself and in Joss, but it took different forms.
Fiddler Joss, being impressively introduced by one of the gentlemen in the pulpit, began without preface to read rapidly from the fifth chapter of Romans, a task he accomplished with the assistance of a pair of double eyeglasses. He formally appropriated no text, and it would be difficult to furnish any connected account of his sermon.
So far as anybody could see, he led as moral a life as a Chinaman can endure comfortably; he was good to his family, good to himself, he was sober, he would overreach a Spaniard when he could, but when he had given his word he kept it; he burned incense before joss, he read the analects of Kung Foo Too and Mang Tse, and worshipped his ancestors; he never stole or used any kind of profanity that moral Spaniards could understand.
He cast about suspicious and irate glances. An invincible placidity of expression helped Davidson wonderfully at the moment, and the other, of course, could have no grounds for the slightest suspicion of any sort of understanding between his wife and this customer. As to Mrs. Schomberg, she sat there like a joss. Davidson was lost in admiration.
This, in Burton's facetious phrase, was "Mrs. Burton's joss house;" and occasionally, when they had differences, he threatened "to throw her joss house out of the window." Burton in a rage, indeed, was the signal for the dispersal of everybody. Furniture fell, knick-knacks flew from the table, and like Jupiter he tumbled gods on gods.
There is a small temple on a platform, with a figure of Pul or Buddha in the centre, two brass candlesticks by his side, and a small incense burner at his feet. "Joss sticks" are constantly burned before him and fill the temple with scent and haze.
"He found 'em about half a mile off, in front of a Mott Street joss house, all prayin' an' burnin' punk an' huddled together, skeered green from the yellin's they'd heard. He dropped it in solemn, an' said what the Chinks took ter be a prayer; but it was really the oath he said.
These servants had curious ways, and a curious language in the odd pidgin English that enabled the door boy to announce that "the number one topside foreign devil joss man have makee come," when the English Bishop called, and the table boy to announce a dish of duckling as "one piecee duck pups," or of chicken as "one piecee looster."
In the investigation he had borne himself with unexceptionable modesty and equanimity. That he should be "picked on" offended that generous esprit de corps which was natural to the office. Tommy Burt was all for referring the matter to Mr. Gordon. "You mind your own business, Tommy," said Banneker placidly. "Our friend the Joss will stick his foot into a gopher hole yet."
It was a quiet corner, you see, and a sort of breeze from the gully came in at the window now and then. Besides the mats, there was no other furniture in the room only the coffin, and the old joss all green and blue and purple with age and polish. Fung-Tching never told us why he called the place "The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows." Most of them are flowery.
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