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15
Saturday, 11 July

     This afternoon, after another rainy day, we went into the city to look at shops.  Though I had bought a couple fans for me only a week ago I wanted now to get another, a bamboo fan carved with bamboo leaves, something I had long been desirous of possessing, and I wanted to paint it with a picture of the Three Pools and to inscribe a verse on the other side, after the Chinese custom. We wandered along to the fan shop and bought the fan I wanted and a new one for Dorothy, and some papers. Then we poked some more and got me a stalwart, very masculine oiled paper umbrella, one of the kind for which Hangchou is famous, and another little thing I had long thought of getting when at last I should come to this city. So we wandered, stopping here and there to look at this and that. Hangchou is an interesting city. There are some excellent broad xx streets, well-paved with hard gravel-topped paving, and some fine looking modern shops, banks, and business buildings. Most of the streets in the new section opened by the removal of the wall are wide and well-paved. We live on such an one. But when one passes a few of the larger buildings and fine banks on his way along the main street, one plunges suddenly into a thoroughfare not twenty feet wide, stone-flagged, made into an arcade on a sunny day by the awnings and advertising banners of the shops. Here one finds the famous fan shop, paper shops, silk shops, ink shops, and shops for the purveyance of an infinite variety of necessary and desirable commodities. It is interesting to think that through the changes that have come upon the city since his day it may be possible that the streets are not substantially altered in location and direction, and that once [[strikethrough]] he [[/strikethrough]] ^[[Marco Polo]] may have trod the very flags we walk so carelessly.

Sunday, 12 July

     Having determined that we would venture an entire day's diversion in a hike into the hills we gave orders, encouraged by a bright sunset, for the cook to make us next day a lunch to be carried in our hands. This morning after breakfast we packed the lunch, ^[[and]] a few books and bits of paper and pens, into the packsack and set out for the north shore