int with the bullion and opium, the full freight and
gains of a year's voyaging and trading. Half an hour or an hour hence
she will be free, and the junk dropping down to sea with the drugs in
her. All at once a shriek or yell of "Hard aport!" and a great
iron outward-bound steamer from Hong-Kong bursts into the unwieldy
Chinaman, goes crunching through her like ripping pasteboard; tears
her open; snarls through steamy nostrils and cindery fiery mouth, and
growls over her wreck. And the sodden, stupefied merchantman, as if
drunk with opium, goes yelling and staggering with her sleepy drugs to
the bottom, and stays there, sycee silver and all.

From pricking his way across the Tartar plains, and probing in the
Dead Sea and eating its fruits, just to know that living crustaceae
could be found in one and pulpy flesh in the other, our Launfal,
looking for the Sangreal in chariot-wheels, wound his devious way to
the Flowery Kingdom, having tried a stroke or two at pearl-diving, and
given some valuable hints, that were wasted, in Red Sea fishing and
the Suez Canal. The sleepy Celestial seasons had gone flowering their
way to paradise, and the opium-smuggler and her sycee silver lay safe
and swallowed in ribs and jowl of quicksand. Our American proposed to
have it up by the locks. Two things said Nay--the coral insect, which
was using it in its architectural designs, and the hungry quicksand.
Worst of all, the American could not find it. They hid the bulky
vessel in hills of sand, and after two months' labor in submarine
armor the speculator was beaten. "Get a coolie," said a resident China
merchant, and he did.

Every seaport city of China is a twin. It is two cities--one inland,
narrow-streeted, paved with rubble stones; the other at sea, floating
on bamboo reeds. The amphibious inmates of the marine town never
go ashore, but are a species of otter or seal. Besides, they are
first-class thieves, as well as cowardly, cruel pirates and wreckers.
They will steal the sheathing from a copper-bottomed vessel in broad
daylight, and at night a guard-boat is necessary for protection. They
will defy a sentry on shipboard--steal his ship from under him while
he is wondering what he is set to guard. They are all expert divers,
as familiar with the sea-bottom as with their own ugly little hovels.
Such a native was found, and for a dollar spotted the submerged vessel
in her matrix of sand and coral.

"Now set a guard-boat," said the En