who, when apologized to in writing by a Dutch governor
of Batavia who had murdered almost all the Chinese there, replied that
China had no interest in wretches who had left their native land. A
thousand years ago the Chinese put the soldier lowest in the scale and
the scholar highest, with the man of business as of no importance. And
yet these commercial peoples barred their gates to him! For a number
of days he took his place in the shade of a davited boat, and now
and again he read from a quaint book the Analects of Confucius.

We sailed on Wednesday, and on Sunday made the first tropic, nearly
twenty-three and a half degrees above the line. No rough weather
or unkindly wind had disturbed us from the hour we had left the
"too nyked" man upon the wharf, and Sunday, when I went to take my
bath before breakfast, I felt the soft fingers of the South caress my
body, and looking out upon the purple ocean, whose expanse was barely
dimpled by gleams of silver, I saw flying-fish skimming the crests
of the swinging waves. The officers and stewards appeared in white;
the passengers, too, put off their temperate-zone clothes, and the
decks were gay with color. We all seemed to feel that we must be in
consonance with the loving nature that had made the sky so blue and
the sea so still.

The Chinese--he was Leung Kai Chu on the list--did not change his
melancholy black. The deck sports were organized, ship tennis, quoits,
and golf, and the disks rattled about his feet; but though he often
moved his chair to aid those seeking a lost quoit or ring, and bowed
ceremoniously to those who begged his pardon for bothering him, he
kept his position. I felt a somber sense of gathering tragedy. In
his face was a growing detachment from everything about him; he
hardly knew that we were there, that he ate and slept, and took his
seat by the boat. All of us felt this, but with many it meant merely
remarking that "the Chink is getting off his head," and a wish that
he would not obtrude his grief when we were filled with the joy of
sunny skies and a merry company.

The tragedy came sooner than expected by me. I had cast a thought to
my understanding that the philosophy of Confucius did not contemplate
self-destruction, and had been divided between relief and wonder that
it was so.

It was dusk of Monday. The sun had sunk behind the glowing rim of
the western horizon, and the air was suffused with a trembling rose
color, when Leung Kai Chu tap