d catching his sleeve, said: "Surely it is you!" Then
they embraced and wept. Presently they went back together to his
father's lodging. But his father abused him, saying: "Your conduct has
disgraced the family. How dare you show your face again?" So saying, he
took him out of the house and led him to the ground between the
Ch`uu-chiang Pond and the Apricot Gardens. Here he stripped him naked and
thrashed him with his horse-whip, till the young man succumbed to the
pain and collapsed. The father then left him and went away.

But the young man's singing-master had told some of his friends to
watch what happened to him. When they saw him stretched inanimate on the
ground, they came back and told the other members of the troupe.

The news occasioned universal lamentation, and two men were despatched
with a reed mat to cover up the body. When they got there they found his
heart still warm, and when they had held him in an upright posture for
some time, his breathing recommenced. So they carried him home between
them and administered liquid food through a reed-pipe. Next morning, he
recovered consciousness; but after several months he was still unable to
move his hands and feet. Moreover, the sores left by his thrashing
festered in so disgusting a manner that his friends found him too
troublesome, and one night deposited him in the middle of the road.
However, the passers-by, harrowed by his condition, never failed to
throw him scraps of food.

So copious was his diet that in three months he recovered sufficiently
to hobble with a stick. Clad in a linen coat,--which was knotted
together in a hundred places, so that it looked as tattered as a quail's
tail,--and carrying a broken saucer in his hand, he now went about the
idle quarters of the town, earning his living as a professional beggar.

Autumn had now turned to winter. He spent his nights in public
lavatories and his days haunting the markets and booths.

One day when it was snowing hard, hunger and cold had driven him into
the streets. His beggar's cry was full of woe and all who heard it were
heart-rent. But the snow was so heavy that hardly a house had its outer
door open, and the streets were empty.

When he reached the eastern gate of An-i, about the seventh or eighth
turning north of the Hsuun-li Wall, there was a house with the
double-doors half open.

It was the house where Miss Li was then living, but the young man did
not know.

He stood before the doo