r importance to her situation, which rendered her foreign
and piquante. But, then, everything, in this world, is relative.

Racial types seem to be a failure: when they become very marked, the
race deteriorates or vanishes. In the counties of England, after only
a thousand years, the women you meet in the rural districts and country
towns all look like sisters. The Asiatics, of course, are much more
sunk in type than the Anglo-Saxons; and they show us the way we would be
going. Only, there is hope in rapid transit and the cosmopolitan spirit,
and especially in these United States, which bring together the ends
of the earth, and place side by side a descendant of the Puritans like
Freeman, and a daughter of Irak-Ajemi.

"What are you coming to California for, Mr. Freeman?"

Freeman had already told her what he had been in the Isthmus for,--to
paddle in miasmatic swamps with a view to the possibility of a canal
in the remote, speculative future. He had given her a graphic and
entertaining picture of the hideous and inconceivable life he had led
there for six months, from which he had emerged the only member of a
party of nineteen (whites, blacks, and yellows) who was not either dead
by disease, by violence, or by misadventure, or had barely escaped with
life and a shattered constitution. Freeman, after emerging from the
miasmatic hell and lake of Gehenna, had taken a succession of baths,
with soap and friction, had been attended by a barber and a tailor, and
had himself attended the best table to be found for love or money in the
charming town of Panama. He had also spent more than half of the week
of his sojourn there in sleep; and he was now in the best possible
condition, physical and mental,--though not, he admitted, pecuniary. As
to morals, they had not reached that discussion yet. But, in all that
he did say, Freeman exhibited perfect unreserve and frankness, answering
without hesitation or embarrassment any question she chose to ask (and
she asked some curious ones).

But when she asked him such an innocent thing as what he was after in
California--an inquiry, by the way, put more in idleness than out of
curiosity--Freeman stroked his yellow moustache with the thumb of the
hand that held his Cuban cigarette, gazed with narrowed eyelids at the
horizon, and for some time made no reply at all. Finally he said that
California was a place he had never visited, and that it would be a pity
to have been so near it and y