The smell of fish, mud, coal, hemp, tar rushes, and the sailors who are drunk in the daytime, carrying wine bottles and singing songs are running around, and the four-wheeled carts are jolting and jingling bells on the gravel road. All this outside the carriage shows that Gao Yi has come to Hongkou again.

McPherson opened the window, and the little half leaned out of the door, loudly pointing the coachman in the right direction. The carriage zigzagged through the narrow streets and alleys, and had penetrated into an area that Gao Yi had never touched, rope factories, small shipyards, shipbreaking yards, ship repair yards, rigging factories, blacksmith factories, and all kinds of ship-related workshop-style small factories appeared on both sides of the labyrinthine alleys, just like the second-hand electrical appliances street in later generations, or the hardware and grocery small commodity market, which could always make the people in it completely lose their direction.

Fortunately, I went to pick up McPherson today, otherwise it would be up to them, and Gao Yi doubted whether they would be able to find the ground smoothly.

Finally, after another exhaustion of mountains and rivers, the carriage bypassed a high wall, and Gao Yi's eyes suddenly opened up - the beachhead of the Huangpu River was within easy reach.

"It can't be that building, right? Kim Dong Lee Building? Gao Yi asked.

There was a three-storey warehouse standing alone on the beach, the whole façade was black and swarthy as if it had been burned by a fire, and the windows were open, and occasionally a few pieces of glass reflected the light, like a black hole with a large number of missing teeth. However, on the flat roof of this seemingly abandoned building, an iron funnel that only serves as a chimney sticks out, and black smoke slowly rises from inside, all indicating that this place is inhabited.

"Yes, that's our house, Mr. Gao Yi!"

After Gao Yi entered the building, he found that there were really a lot of "we", except for McPherson and his family, there were seventeen or eight families living on each floor, because of the proximity to the meal, the corridor was full of all kinds of smells, and Gao Yi even smelled someone making typical Jiangnan vegetables and scallion grilled crucian carp.

The McPherson family consisted of three families, the Macphersons and his wife's two older brothers.

"Thomas McElhorn."

"Jonny McElhorn."

"Minna, Isabella, my wife Emily."

If it is only three young couples, it is definitely not a big family, but if these three couples have a total of eleven children, it is completely different. While Gao Yi was standing at the door of the living room and shaking hands with McPherson's family one by one, the bear children were running around them, and two of them were particularly naughty, and they tried to break Gao Yi's legs and get into them as a new hideout spot for peek-a-boo.

It wasn't until Minna and Isabella took the group of children out of the house that Gao Yi finally found an opportunity to look around. The room was not as unbearable as he imagined, on the contrary, it can be said that it was neatly arranged, although the tables and chairs were Western-style, but it could be seen that the handiwork and wood were from the local area, but because of this, the wood was very elegant, and the craftsmanship was also very fine and authentic; The walls are covered with a layer of silk wallcoat with green and white vertical stripes, which is clean and bright to the eyes; There are two stories that can be recognized by Yi kindergarten-level Bible knowledge, one of which is the sacrifice of Abraham in red with Isaac in blue, and the other of Daniel, who is dressed in yellow, being thrown into the hole of a green lion; In the corner behind the dining table was a chest with drawers filled with glasses, coffee cups, sugar jugs, milk jugs, a teapot and a crystal glass bottle containing half a bottle of rose-colored liquid. At the base of the cabinet is a porcelain plate depicting a woman with a parasol walking with a soldier-like child turning an iron ring. The porcelain plate is held against a copy of the Bible, so as not to fall down and smash the cups and bottles gathered around.

Gao Yi observed and studied everything around him with great interest. He is now in contact with two main types of people, one is the top class of Westerners living in garden mansions, and the other is the Chinese middle class living in lane houses; He himself came from the lowest class of the Westerners, so he knew very well how this class lived; He also knew that the single wage earners of the Westerners, that is, the single part of the middle class, generally lived in dormitories provided by trading companies, and some of them were well-paid and did not know how to be frugal, so they simply stayed in high-end hotels such as the Licha Hotel all year round; As for the top and bottom of the remaining Chinese, it is naturally the same as other places in the Qing Dynasty, the rich lie in the Zhumen compound, and the poor are frozen and frozen.

However, there is always a missing piece in this puzzle, where has the Western middle class who came to the East with their wives and children gone? Gao Yi had never heard of a Westerner who rented a Shikumen house like him, nor had he seen a small house like a house exist.

The mystery was finally revealed today, and it turned out that they lived in apartments - of course, most of them would not be as dilapidated as they were here.

It's not surprising that much of the middle class in Paris and London is living like this today. Gao Yi always associated the middle class with the small single-family houses such as houses, mainly influenced by later generations, and they were American.

"How much do these apartments cost?" Gao Yi asked.

"Two pounds a set, and we're going to pay a full six pounds a month for these three rooms." The answer was Jonny McElhorn, McPherson's second brother. Six pounds is roughly equivalent to sixty oceans, which is not cheap.

"When Tom joins the police force, we'll be able to move to a better apartment." Jonny added that Tom was his brother Thomas McElhorn. Jonny is also a member of the police force, but he still does the lowest patrols. Tom failed to get into the police force, so he got a job as a temporary janitor with a salary of twenty dollars a month.

The total income of the three of them is actually not small, McPherson has a monthly salary of seventy yuan as a first-class patrolman, Johnny has a monthly salary of forty-five yuan as a third-class patrolman, plus Tom's twenty yuan, a total of one hundred and thirty-five yuan. It's just that they have too many children to feed, and seven of them are Jonny's, so in fact he is the real culprit who drags down everyone's quality of life, but he himself doesn't seem to know it.

Dinner time soon arrived, and since the living room itself doubled as a dining room, everyone went straight to the table without even having to move between the two rooms.

The children were brought back to the drawing-room, this time most of them had been washed and dressed, and were sternly admonished, so that each one stood straight with his hands behind his back, and only when the men had all sat down did they sit down at the table one by one, under the command of the women.

Gao Yi noticed a little girl walking at the back of the queue, blonde hair and blue eyes, wearing a blue bead necklace that matched the color of her eyes, the most beautiful child Gao Yi had ever seen, not even one of them.

"Is that your daughter?" Gao Yi asked at McPherson.

"That's right. Cathy, come over here. McPherson beckoned to the little girl.

Mr. and Mrs. McPherson are both blonde and blue-eyed, and if you want to calculate their appearance as a couple, their pair should be the most beautiful pair Gao Yi has ever seen, and there is no one of them.

The little girl walked over unhurriedly like a little adult and curtsy to Gao Yi. Gao Yi noticed that she also had six fingers.

The six fingers of the father and daughter are not the same as the other six fingers that Gao Yi has seen before, and the other people with six fingers seem to be incompletely developed in the metacarpal bones, so the extra finger is often like an accessory on top of the other finger, looking like a "Y". But the hands of the father and daughter look like ordinary people, and if you don't look closely, you won't see much of the difference. It's just that McPherson's hands are proportionally wider than those of ordinary people, so it is inevitable that people will notice when shaking hands. However, when he came to his daughter, he didn't even have this defect, and if Gao Yi hadn't deliberately counted her, he might not have found that she had six fingers at all. It's just unclear if this trait will change as she gets older.

"It's so cute, can you get her to sit next to me?" Gao Yi asked, pointing to the position between him and McPherson.

Obviously, this position should be sat by the hostess Emily, but Gao Yi found that the big family did not sit in a way that men and women were separated from each other, but the men sat in a bunch, with children in the middle, and the women sat at the other end. This can be seen from the way they sit now, the three men are sitting together, there is a vacant position in the middle, and then Gao Yi is next. That's why Gao Yi made such a proposal, otherwise he would have Emily across the way when he chatted with these three, which was too inconvenient.

"Absolutely!" McPherson was also glad to be able to sit with his daughter, so a small box was brought from a seat and rested beside Gao Yi, and the little girl sat on it safely, fulfilling her duties as hostess in place of her mother.

The topics at the dinner table are about promotions, salary increases, Tom's ability to join the police force one day, about the yearning for an apartment house on the edge of pidgin, about the fluctuation of food prices and the hard work, and about the curiosity about high society life. Gao Yi found that whenever he talked about the rules of high society, the little girl would always show a listening appearance, as if she longed for how princes and princesses should live.

In addition to these topics, there is another conversation material that cannot be avoided and will always be brought up, and that is the Scottto Cup that follows, which is one of the reasons why Gao Yi was invited to dinner here today, he is now the captain of the Scottish team, and McPherson is the second captain.

The night in March was still a little cold, listening to the wind rising on the river, watching the stove, eating the steaming dark dishes made by the Macpherson family with oriental ingredients, and imagining the cold mist outside crawling across the desolate tidal flats by the river, Gao Yi only felt that this meal was no worse than the delicacies of the mountains and seas of the Rida family, and even more relaxed and pleasant.