Читать книгу The Sea: Its Stirring Story of Adventure, Peril, & Heroism (Vol. 1-4). The History of Sea Voyages, Discovery, Piracy and Maritime Warfare онлайн

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“Strange countries for to see.”

How many curiosities has he not to show—from the inevitable parrot, chattering in a foreign tongue, or swearing roundly in English vernacular, to the little ugly idol brought from India, but possibly manufactured in Birmingham!93 If from China, he will probably have brought home some curious caddy, fearfully and wonderfully inlaid with dragons and impossible landscapes; an ivory pagoda, or, perhaps, one of those wonderfully-carved balls, with twenty or so more inside it, all separate and distinct, each succeeding one getting smaller and smaller. He may have with him a native oil-painting; if a portrait, stolid and hard; but if of a ship, true to the last rope, and exact in every particular. In San Francisco, where there are 14,000 or more Chinese, may be seen native paintings of vessels which could hardly be excelled by a European artist, and the cost of which for large sizes, say 3½ by 2½ feet, was only about fifteen dollars (£3). What with fans, handkerchiefs, Chinese ladies’ shoes for feet about three inches in length, lanterns, chopsticks, pipes, rice-paper drawings, books, neat and quaint little porcelain articles for presents at home, it will be odd if Jack, who has been mindful of the “old folks at home,” and the young folks too, and the “girl he left behind him,” does not become a very popular man.