RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
they had “saved his life.” I had some sentimental attachment for them on this account—until I saw them. But when I saw them I felt at once that everything else, to be in keeping, ought surely to be swathed in fly-specked pink gauze. The electric fans were of the variety associated in one’s mind with ice-cream “parlours”; two broad blades attached to the ceiling in the middle of the room. They had been installed in both the dining-room and sala—or sitting-room—and it was not possible in either room to see anything else. These fans were the subject of endless contention between Mr. Taft and me, but I gave in and left them to continue their mission of saving his life. He says yet that I often acknowledged on hot nights that he was right about them, but I never did.
My husband had secured his house staff in Hongkong, through the kind offices of Admiral Dewey’s servant, Ah Man, as I have already written, but being new to the ways of the Oriental, he was destined very quickly to gather some unique experience. There were four of them: the cook, the number one boy, the number two boy and the laundryman. The laundryman was Mr. Taft’s own inspiration. The Filipino laundryman, he had heard, takes the linen of his master’s household down to some stream, preferably the shallows of the Pásig, and hammers it into ribbons on smooth rocks which he uses for washboard purposes. Then he spreads the articles on the grass to dry, and the consequences were found, not infrequently, to be a bad outbreak on the master’s skin of what is known as “adobe itch,” a troublesome disease. So Mr. Taft had engaged a Chinese laundryman and had sent back to San Francisco for tubs and washboards and wringers and all the necessary paraphernalia, and had installed an up-to-date laundry in his own house, where the orders were to boil the clothes and hang them on a line. It worked perfectly, though it did take the Chinaman from the wilds of Shanghai some
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