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110

library, and my special charge and pride and joy. 

Friday, 16 October

Last night I got a package slip from the post office and had to pay ninety cents postage for getting the thing up from Paofu. I was quite ecited about it, so Dorothy went to the post office today to get it. She had to pay twenty-five cents more for octroi, and when the box came home it proved to be a wooden case containing nine bottles of Dermax, a fluid used in connection with making mimeograph stencils. It had come from Shanghai and was addressed to me at Paofu, Hopei University. I guessed that they had originally ordered it from Peking, and that my name had got mixed up in it through the fact of my having bought the machine here last year. Anyway I wrote to T'ang Tse Ch'ing about it, and put the box in my study. I found out later that my surmise has been right, but that the order had been cancelled. Now I have to go to the Peking dealer and give him the box for the money I spent, or arrange some settlement elsewhere. Rather a disappointment, but amusing none the less. 

Also today we got new red curtains for the dining room and got them up, so that room is now quite presentable and very satisfactory to us. 

Saturday, 17 October

This afternoon we met Tom and Violet and caught the 2:55 train in the direction of Paofu. After a half-hour's ride, down past the racecourse where the crowds were gathering for the afternoon, we got off at Lu Kuo Ch'iao. We had a long dicker with the donkey men to handle our stuff, but finally got three donkeys for two days for two dollars apiece. They had a last grand scrap because one old man, too old for the work, would not allow one of the men we had picked to go, with us. There was finally no choice, if we were to get rid of the old man, but to change that donkey, unload and reload the stuff, and let the two go back to fhight it out. 

Before going further on the week-end I ought to digress to comment on two things we left behind us in Peking. They are sitting on a large gray cushion on our living room floor just now, making