Excerpt: ... is thirty cents a day, at the highest thirty-two cents Mex. In the weaving department they have piece work and get up to forty cents. I will tell you something of what we had to eat in one small afternoon. First, lunch of all courses here at the hotel. Then we went to the newspaper where we had tea and cake at about four. From there to the house of the daughter of a leading statesman of the Manchus, she being a lady of small feet and ten children, who has offered a prize for the best essay on the ways to stop concubinage, which they call the whole system of plural marriage. They say it is quite unchanged among the rich. There we were given a tea of a rare sort, unknown in our experience. Two kinds of meat pies which are made in the form of little cakes and quite peculiar in taste, delicious; also cake. Then after we went to the restaurant where we were to have dinner. First we got into the wrong hotel and there, while we were waiting, they gave us tea. We were struck by the fact that they asked for nothing when we left, and thanked us for coming to the wrong place. Then we went to the right hotel across the street from the first. They called it the corner of Broadway and 42nd Street, and it is that. There is a big roof garden besides the hotels, and they are both run by the Department stores which have their places underneath. It may be a sad commentary on the human character that one can eat more than one can remember, but that is what we did last night. First of all we went into the room which was all Chinese furniture; very small round table in the middle and the rows of stools along one side for the singing girls, who do not dance here. Those stools were not used, as all the young Chinese are ashamed of that institution and want to get rid of it. On a side table were almonds shelled, nice little ones, different from ours and very sweet. Beside them were dried watermelon seeds which were hard to crack and so I did not taste them. All the...
