Charley knew that I could refuse him nothing, but the trip of several
hundred miles into a district rarely, if ever, visited by foreigners,
involved more of a risk than I cared to assume. Charley seeing that I
looked unusually solemn, turned to Akong for support.

"What for you no go too, Cha-tsze? Just now my thinkee no got new chop
come inside two week; get back plenty time."

Akong's pigeon-English perhaps requires explanation: You must know,
then, that the Chinese with whom all foreigners transact business,
instead of learning correct English have a lingo, or _patois_, of their
own, ascribed, but I think erroneously, to the carelessness of their
first English visitors, who addressed them in this manner, thinking to
make themselves more easily understood. The fact is, that
pigeon-English, besides having many Portuguese words mixed up with
it,--the Portuguese, you know, were established in China as early as
the seventeenth century,--is in many instances a literal translation of
Chinese into perverted English. In the present instance, Akong
suggested that as there would be no more tea down for a fortnight, it
would be well for me, too, to go. The proposition was quite agreeable
to me, and Charley scampered off to tell Ahim, the cook, and Aho, my
boy, to make the necessary preparations.

The next morning, at an early hour, Akong's great mandarin, or
house-boat, was moored at the jetty, and the boys were packing away the
provisions and the charcoal for cooking, and long strings of copper
"cash" to be used in the purchase of eggs and chickens, and the mats of
rice that would form the principal article of "chow-chow" for the crew.
Everybody in China has a boy, and Charley had his; a regular young imp