ey all worshipped money.
There is that Captain Higginson. He seems to like Henrietta."

"He will never marry her," retorted Mamma Achun. "He will be an admiral
before he dies--"

"A rear-admiral," Ah Chun interpolated.

"Yes, I know. That is the way they retire."

"His family in the United States is a high one. They would not like it
if he married . . . if he did not marry an American girl."

Ah Chun knocked the ashes out of his pipe, thoughtfully refilling the
silver bowl with a tiny pleget of tobacco. He lighted it and smoked it
out before he spoke.

"Henrietta is the oldest girl. The day she marries I will give her three
hundred thousand dollars. That will fetch that Captain Higginson and his
high family along with him. Let the word go out to him. I leave it to
you."

And Ah Chun sat and smoked on, and in the curling smoke-wreaths he saw
take shape the face and figure of Toy Shuey--Toy Shuey, the maid of all
work in his uncle's house in the Cantonese village, whose work was never
done and who received for a whole year's work one dollar. And he saw his
youthful self arise in the curling smoke, his youthful self who had
toiled eighteen years in his uncle's field for little more. And now he,
Ah Chun, the peasant, dowered his daughter with three hundred thousand
years of such toil. And she was but one daughter of a dozen. He was not
elated at the thought. It struck him that it was a funny, whimsical
world, and he chuckled aloud and startled Mamma Achun from a revery which
he knew lay deep in the hidden crypts of her being where he had never
penetrated.

But Ah Chun's word went forth, as a whisper, and Captain Higginson forgot
his rear-admiralship and his high family and took to wife three hundred
thousand dollars and a refined and cultured girl who was one
thirty-second Polynesian, one-sixteenth Italian, one-sixteenth
Portuguese, eleven thirty-seconds English and Yankee, and one-half
Chinese.

Ah Chun's munificence had its effect. His daughters became suddenly
eligible and desirable. Clara was the next, but when the Secretary of
the Territory formally proposed for her, Ah Chun informed him that he
must wait his turn, that Maud was the oldest and that she must be married
first. It was shrewd policy. The whole family was made vitally
interested in marrying off Maud, which it did in three months, to Ned
Humphreys, the United States immigration commissioner. Both he and Maud
complained, for the