Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III MY FIRST CHANCE AT THE MANCHURIAN TRAIL AND HOW WE HAVE AN ADVENTURE WITH THE RED-BEARDS I thought I had rediscovered one of those truths which are revealed to savages and hid from political economists. Stevenson. I Am sitting in the quaint little office of our company in Harbin, the last important city of China before one steps over into Siberia. I, myself, should find it hard to think of facts and figures in an office which has for its outlook a curved tile roof, with curious gargoyles and dragons holding on to the ridgepole. I am sure that in such a place as this I could not put a pin through my mind, sticking it down to business and a desk. It all tempts my fancy away to fairies, goblins, and suchlike folk. Fortunately for me, I am the wife of the business man and not the business man himself, and my thoughts are free to wander. At present my husband’s work takes him all over these three provinces that make up Manchuria and often I get my chance at the long trails. Great Manchuria! At once the hope and despair of China! With its potential possibilities it is the ‘ big chance’ for the man crowded out of the other eighteen provinces. Mongolia and Manchuria are China’s unsettled tracts, and are, between them, rich in all resources. Therein lies her peril, for other nations are determined to get hold of this border country. With each disturbance in her internal affairs, the foreign powers have wrested from her some new rights in these frontiers. Harbin, that I sit looking out upon, is half-Russian; beyond the curved, tiled roofs, I can see the gold-domed churches of the Russians; they, and all that they signify, overshadow the city. From here, the Russians spread north and south over the land. All of Manchuria above the Amur River is now a part of Siberia, …
