Viewing page 120 of 187

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

117

Sunday October 25.
We spent the whole morning writing letters and the Memoirs except for a few minutes when Tom and Violet came in after being to the Catholic church for the eleven o'clock Mass. About five, tired of being in the house we went out for a walk and while we were out explored the German cemetery that is just inside the southeast corner of the wall. It is not used any more, but was evidently the one cemetery for Germans and Italian buriels before Boxer times and just after. The place was very well kept and the trees large and kind.

Walking homeward at sunset time we decided to drop in at Clove Alley and see what the girls were doing. We found them all at home and just ready to have tea so we sat about on the floor and ate much toast and butter and little cakes and talked until it was time to come home for dinner. The kids do have a very happy existence, so carefree and informal that it seems impossible it is really part of this conventional, eternally troubled old Peking.

Monday October 26.
Today has been a very special day in the history of the Peking Marches. We had lunch early and then went up to Sing Kee's and ordered the remaking of a work coat for me, cravenette outside and camel;s hair cloth inside; short and comfortable for hiking and riding the bicycle. Then we went up to the Fair at Lung Fu Ssu and found what we had been wanting ever since June, a pup that satisfied our desire for an utterly unusual dog. There is always one block in an alley just near the Fair where dogs are sold and we walked up that alley looking them all over. Pedegreed poodles turned up their pink noses at us and wriggled with pride as their owners told us scandalous prices for them; stolen hunting dogs grown thin with lack of care fawned as we put out our hands to touch them; and baskets full of little, squirming puppies of questionable and wonkish ancestry seemed very desirable in their helplessness. But down at the very end of the line a tiny yellow and white raggamuffin pup stood up and danced as we approached. He leaped up against Dorothy and started licking her hand affectionately. Her heart was lost at once. Truly he was, according to Dorothy, "a perfect lamb."