THE TEA-SHOP


When we landed at Sitka I went ashore with a fellow passenger. He was
a clever man, and had made trips up there already for the sake of
taking photographs of the people and the scenery; he knew Sitka well
and came up to me just before we arrived there with the remark:

"If you come with me I'll take you to have tea with the prettiest girl
you've ever seen."

This certainly seemed an invitation to accept, and I did so on the
spot.

"She really is," he continued, observing my sceptically raised
eyebrows, "wonderfully pretty. She keeps a tea-shop and she is
Chinese." With that he bolted into his own cabin, which was next mine,
and as I heard him laughing, I concluded he was joking and thought no
more about it. However, as the ship glided up over flat sheets of
golden water to the landing-stage, he joined me again, and together we
stood looking up the principal street of Sitka which runs down to meet
the little quay.

It was just four in the afternoon, and everything was vivid living
gold, as the floods of yellow sunshine filled all the shining air. The
green copper dome of the church alone stood out a soft spot of
delicate colour in the dazzling burnished haze.

At the sides of the street sat and crouched the small squat figures of
the Alaskan Indians, each with a mat before it on which the owner had