Children of China

There is a nook among the hills in far-away China to which, if only I possessed the famous flying carpet, I should very much like to carry you. To know it properly one ought to find it for oneself upon a day in spring. The road to it runs at the foot of steep hills, on which the grey earth peeps through a threadbare carpet of dry grasses.

Above these lower hills the mountain-sides are green, shading into slate-colour and black; and when the sky clouds over, they look dark and angry. The road rounds a corner and passes a wood: a few more steps and the baby valley is in sight.

To leave the path and pick your way through some trees is the work of a moment. You reach an open space like a little lawn. Above the lawn is a bank, on which, among shrubs and scattered trees, many flowers are growing.

A faint scent of almonds breathes in the air. You feast your eyes on great wild roses and azaleas, rose-coloured, magenta, crimson—bushes of red fire burning among ferns and green branches. Here, you notice tufted flowers like feathers carved in ivory: there, white jasmine, clematis and plants whose shining leaves are nearly covered by balls of snow. Over the flowers and under the tree-tops great swallow-tailed butterflies go whirling by. It is as if one of the old men of the hills of whom Chinese stories tell, had opened a doorway in the mountain-side and led you into a sweet wild garden of fairyland.

The daily round of life in China is bare enough, like a worn road winding among hills; but when one comes to know the children of the country, it is like finding a surprise garden where one had only looked for rocks and boulders. The love of boys and girls, and the tenderness and self-denial which they call forth among older people, are the flowers that grow in this enchanted spot.

The flying carpet was lost long ago, when this old world forgot how to be young, but you boys and girls sometimes weave one for yourselves and fly off as far as Pekin or Peru. It is my hope in these pages to join some of you in this pleasant task and carry you to some of the far-off garden nooks of China.

The Chinese by Sir John F. Davies, Child Life in Chinese Homes, by Mrs Bryson, and Chinese Slave Girls, by Miss M. E. Talmage, are books which have helped me to write about the children of China. I am sure they will interest you by and by whenever you can find time to read them. But the big Chinese city in which I live, and the hundreds of villages round it, help me most of all to tell you about China and its boys and girls, and I greatly hope that one day some of you may come and see them for yourselves.