er, Stevenson, called it. You never
stop to consider that it is only by chance that you leave home and arrive
at the office alive--millions and millions of you--poor old
stick-in-the-muds! Because this or that hasn't happened to you, you
can't be made to believe that it might have happened to someone else.
What's a wood fire to you but a shin warmer? And how you hate to walk
alone! So sheer off--this is not for you.

But to you, fenced in by circumstance, walls of breathless brick and
stone, suffocating with longing, you whose thought springs ever toward the
gorgeous sunset and the ends of rainbows; who fly in dreams across the
golden south seas to the far countries, you whose imagination transforms
every ratty old square-rigger that pokes down the bay into a Spanish
galleon--come with me.

For to admire an' for to see,
For to be'old this world so wide.

First off, Ling Foo, of Woosung Road, perhaps the most bewildered Chinaman
in all Shanghai last April. The Blind Madonna flung him into a great game
and immediately cast him out of it, giving him never an inkling of what
the game was about and leaving him buffeted by the four winds of wonder.

A drama--he was sure of that--had rolled up, touched him icily if
slightly, and receded, like a wave on the beach, without his knowing in
the least what had energized it in his direction. During lulls, for years
to come, Ling Foo's consciousness would strive to press behind the wall
for a key to the riddle; for years to come he would be searching the
International Bund, Nanking Road, Broadway and Bubbling Well roads for the
young woman with the wonderful ruddy hair and the man who walked with the
sluing lurch.

Ah, but that man--the face of him, beautiful as that of a foreign boy's,
now young, now old, as though a cobweb shifted to and fro across it! The
fire in those dark eyes and the silk on that tongue! Always that face
would haunt him, because it should not have been a man's but a woman's.
Ling Foo could not go to his gods for comparisons, for a million
variations of Buddha offered no such countenance; so his recollection
would always be tinged with a restless sense of dissatisfaction.

There were other faces in the picture, but with the exception of the
woman's and the man's he could not reassemble the features of any.

A wild and bitter night. The nor'easter, packed with a cold, penetrating
rain, beat down from the Yellow Sea, its