ved I have no doubt. But if you'll allow me to
say so, it is not a tribute to the healthy state of your mind. I regret
to say it, but I fear that I agree with you: I think you have lived in
this house too long."

"If I had lived here too long for any other reason," he answered gently,
"enough has been said. It is better we should understand each other.
But, as to my mind--I prefer to keep it unhealthy, if by that you mean
the tendency to project it a little further than reason, founded on such
laws of the universe as we know, can help us. Healthy minds are such as
accept things--endeavor to forget what gives immeasurable pain. I prefer
the pain."

A YELLOW MAN AND A WHITE

BY

ELEANOR GATES

Reprinted from _Scribner's Magazine_ of June, 1905 by permission

FONG WU sat on the porch of his little square-fronted house, chanting
into the twilight. Across his padded blouse of purple silk lay his
_sam-yen_ banjo. And as, from time to time, his hymn to the Three Pure
Ones was prolonged in high, fine quavers, like the uneven, squeaky notes
of a woman's voice, he ran his left hand up the slender neck of the
instrument, rested a long nail of his right on its taut, snake's-skin
head, and lightly touched the strings; then, in quick, thin tones, they
followed the song to Sang-Ching.

The warm shadows of a California summer night were settling down over
the wooded hills and rocky gulches about Fong Wu's, and there was little
but his music to break the silence. Long since, the chickens had
sleepily sought perches in the hen yard, with its high wall of rooty
stumps and shakes, and on the branches of the Digger pine that towered
beside it. Up the dry creek bed, a mile away, twinkled the lights of
Whiskeytown; but no sounds from the homes of the white people came down
to the lonely Chinese. If his clear treble was interrupted, it was by
the cracking of a dry branch as a cottontail sped past on its way to a
stagnant pool, or it was by a dark-emboldened coyote, howling,
dog-like, at the moon which, white as the snow that eternally coifs the
Sierras, was just rising above their distant, cobalt line.

One year before, Fong Wu, heavily laden with his effects, had slipped
out of the stage from Redding and found his way to a forsaken,
ramshackle building below Whiskeytown. His coming had proved of small
interest. When the news finally got about that "a monkey" was living in
"Sam Kennedy's old place," it was thought, for a whil