interest him nor entertain.

But it was not merely his alienness and his growing desire to return to
his Chinese flesh-pots that constituted the problem. There was also his
wealth. He had looked forward to a placid old age. He had worked hard.
His reward should have been peace and repose. But he knew that with his
immense fortune peace and repose could not possibly be his. Already
there were signs and omens. He had seen similar troubles before. There
was his old employer, Dantin, whose children had wrested from him, by due
process of law, the management of his property, having the Court appoint
guardians to administer it for him. Ah Chun knew, and knew thoroughly
well, that had Dantin been a poor man, it would have been found that he
could quite rationally manage his own affairs. And old Dantin had had
only three children and half a million, while he, Chun Ah Chun, had
fifteen children and no one but himself knew how many millions.

"Our daughters are beautiful women," he said to his wife, one evening.
"There are many young men. The house is always full of young men. My
cigar bills are very heavy. Why are there no marriages?"

Mamma Achun shrugged her shoulders and waited.

"Women are women and men are men--it is strange there are no marriages.
Perhaps the young men do not like our daughters."

"Ah, they like them well enough," Mamma Chun answered; "but you see, they
cannot forget that you are your daughters' father."

"Yet you forgot who my father was," Ah Chun said gravely. "All you asked
was for me to cut off my queue."

"The young men are more particular than I was, I fancy."

"What is the greatest thing in the world?" Ah Chun demanded with abrupt
irrelevance.

Mamma Achun pondered for a moment, then replied: "God."

He nodded. "There are gods and gods. Some are paper, some are wood,
some are bronze. I use a small one in the office for a paper-weight. In
the Bishop Museum are many gods of coral rock and lava stone."

"But there is only one God," she announced decisively, stiffening her
ample frame argumentatively.

Ah Chun noted the danger signal and sheered off.

"What is greater than God, then?" he asked. "I will tell you. It is
money. In my time I have had dealings with Jews and Christians,
Mohammedans and Buddhists, and with little black men from the Solomons
and New Guinea who carried their god about them, wrapped in oiled paper.
They possessed various gods, these men, but th