


Produced by David Widger







GOLDSMITH'S FRIEND ABROAD AGAIN

By Mark Twain




     NOTE.--No experience is set down in the following letters
     which had to be invented.  Fancy is not needed to give
     variety to the history of a Chinaman's sojourn in America.
     Plain fact is amply sufficient.




Contents


LETTER I

LETTER II

LETTER III

LETTER IV

LETTER V

LETTER VI

LETTER VII





LETTER I


                                             SHANGHAI, 18--.

DEAR CHING-FOO: It is all settled, and I am to leave my oppressed and overburdened native land and cross the sea to that noble realm where all are free and all equal, and none reviled or abused--America! America, whose precious privilege it is to call herself the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. We and all that are about us here look over the waves longingly, contrasting the privations of this our birthplace with the opulent comfort of that happy refuge. We know how America has welcomed the Germans and the Frenchmen and the stricken and sorrowing Irish, and we know how she has given them bread and work, and liberty, and how grateful they are. And we know that America stands ready to welcome all other oppressed peoples and offer her abundance to all that come, without asking what their nationality is, or their creed or color. And, without being told it, we know that the foreign sufferers she has rescued from oppression and starvation are the most eager of her children to welcome us, because, having suffered themselves, they know what suffering is, and having been generously succored, they long to be generous to other unfortunates and thus show that magnanimity is not wasted upon them.


                                       AH SONG HI.




LETTER II


                                                  AT SEA, 18--.

DEAR CHING-FOO: We are far away at sea now; on our way to the beautiful Land of the Free and Home of the Brave. We shall soon be where all men are alike, and where sorrow is not known.

The good American who hired me to go to his country is to pay me $12 a month, which is immense wages, you know--twenty times as much as one gets in China. My passage in the ship is a very large sum--indeed, it is a fortune--and this I must pay myself eventually, but I am