is brass-bowled pipe and struck a spark from his tinder
box. Through his wide nostrils twin streamers of smoke writhed out,
twisting fantastically together and mixing slowly with the rising river
mist. His pipe became a wand of dreams summoning the genii of glorious
memory. The blood of the Dragon in his veins quickened from the lethargy
to which drudgery had cooled it, and raced hotly as he thought of the
battle past of his forefathers. Off Somewhere along the river's winding
length, where it crawled slowly to the sea, lay the great coast cities.
The lazy ripples, light-tipped, beckoned with luring fingers. There was
naught to stay him. His sampan was his home and movable, therefore the
morrow would see him turning its bow downstream to seek that strange
city where he had heard, dwelt many Foreign Devils who now and then
scattered wealth with a prodigal hand.

In that pale hour when the mist, not yet dissipated by the rising sun,
lay in a cold, silver veil upon the night-chilled water, he pushed out
from the shore and pointed the sampan's prow downstream. Days it took
him to reach salt water. He loitered for light cargoes at village edges,
or picked up the price of his daily rice at odd tasks ashore, but
always, were it day or night for travel, his tiny craft bore surely
seaward. Mile after slow mile dropped behind him, like the praying beads
of a lama's chain, but at last the river salted slightly, and his tiny
craft was lifted by the slow swell of the sea's hand reaching for
inland.

The river became more populous. The crowding sampans, houseboats, and
junks stretched far out into its oily, oozy flow, making a floating city
as he neared the congested life of the coast, where the ever-increasing
population failed to find ground space in its maggoty swarming. As the
stream widened until the farther bank disappeared in the artificial mist
of rising smoke and man-stirred dust, the Foreign Devils' fire junks
appeared, majestically steaming up and down--swift swans that scorned
the logy, lumbering native craft, the mat sails and toiling sweeps of
which made them appear motionless by comparison. A day or two of this
and then the coast, with Shanghai sprawling upon the bank, writhing with
life, odoriferous, noisy, perpetually awake.

Kan Wong slid into its waterfront turmoil, an infinitesimal human atom
added to it. His tiny craft fixed itself upon the outer edge of the
wriggling river life like a coral cell attaching itse