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Updated: May 9, 2025
"We understood," she said, "how impossible it was, in such dreadful weather, to undertake so lengthy a crossing in a sampan." She smiled like a pleased child, and I should be fastidious indeed if I did not admit that to-night she is charming.
Bang, bang went the double gun, the reports almost simultaneous, for in his excitement Archie had no thought of reserving one shot; and as he hastily reloaded he could see in the rapidly dimming light that the rowers were changing the course of their naga, as if to get out of the line of fire, and were beginning to make for the opposite shore; while the big Malay in the small sampan had ceased his efforts to pole his boat more swiftly along, and was using the bamboo to steer the little vessel, which, gathering force from the man's efforts combined with the swift stream, plunged right in through the hanging boughs behind which the two lads crouched.
When we have reached our destination he says "Goodnight," just touches Chrysantheme's hand, and descending once more by the slope which leads to the quays and the shipping, he crosses the roadstead in a sampan, to get on board the 'Triomphante.
Suddenly I heard him cry out at my side in exultation as he bore down on the tiller. The cry was echoed from forward by a loud scream that shot like an arrow through the thunder. Wilbur had sunk beside the rail. The sampan fell off, carried high on the wave. "Then, in a moment like the coming of death, we plunged into the reef.
With their tight trunk-hose of a coarse dark-blue material and short coat to match like an Eton jacket and with their large, round mushroom hats, they were like figures from the crowd of a Flemish Crucifixion. Behind the Barrington's sampan, a large lighter came alongside the wharf.
"The colonel," as the consul was generally called, talked "pidgin" English, which is practically a dialect in itself, to the boat-women. The captain, Mrs. Belgrave, the colonel, and a few others went in the first sampan, and the lady was pleased with the women in charge of the craft; and several children were in a coop at the stern. The price of the craft was ten cents for half an hour.
Japan is indeed most delightful this evening, so fresh and so sweet; and little Chrysantheme was very charming just now, as she silently walked beside me through the darkness of the lane. It is about two o'clock when we reach the 'Triomphante' in a hired sampan, where I have heaped up all my cases till there is danger of sinking.
Eitel's guest, and the next morning he took a steamer for Canton. Here he was met on the pier by an old fellow student of Princeton University, and the two old college friends had a grand reunion. He returned to Hongkong shortly, and next visited Swatow. As they sailed into the harbor, he noticed two Englishmen rowing out toward them in a sampan.
He jumped up, rolled his pigtail round his head swiftly, tucked in two rapid movements his wide dark trousers high up his yellow thighs, and by a single, noiseless, finlike stir of the oars, sheered the sampan alongside the steps with the ease and precision of a swimming fish.
After one has traveled in a Chinese sampan for several days the prospect of a river journey is not very alluring but we had a most agreeable surprise when we sailed out of Foochow in a chartered house boat to hunt the "blue tiger" at Futsing.
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