Fe confronted his master. "Me no likee
Fiddletown. Me belly sick. Me go now." Mr. Tretherick violently
suggested a profane locality. Ah Fe gazed at him placidly, and withdrew.

Before leaving Fiddletown, however, he accidentally met Colonel
Starbottle, and dropped a few incoherent phrases which apparently
interested that gentleman. When he concluded, the colonel handed him a
letter and a twenty-dollar gold piece. "If you bring me an answer, I'll
double that--sabe, John?" Ah Fe nodded. An interview equally accidental,
with precisely the same result, took place between Ah Fe and another
gentleman, whom I suspect to have been the youthful editor of the
AVALANCHE. Yet I regret to state that, after proceeding some distance
on his journey, Ah Fe calmly broke the seals of both letters, and after
trying to read them upside down and sideways, finally divided them into
accurate squares, and in this condition disposed of them to a brother
Celestial whom he met on the road, for a trifling gratuity. The agony
of Colonel Starbottle on finding his wash bill made out on the unwritten
side of one of these squares, and delivered to him with his weekly clean
clothes, and the subsequent discovery that the remaining portions of his
letter were circulated by the same method from the Chinese laundry
of one Fung Ti of Fiddletown, has been described to me as peculiarly
affecting. Yet I am satisfied that a higher nature, rising above the
levity induced by the mere contemplation of the insignificant details
of this breach of trust, would find ample retributive justice in the
difficulties that subsequently attended Ah Fe's pilgrimage.

On the road to Sacramento he was twice playfully thrown from the top of
the stagecoach by an intelligent but deeply intoxicated Caucasian, whose
moral nature was shocked at riding with one addicted to opium-smoking.
At Hangtown he was beaten by a passing stranger--purely an act of
Christian supererogation. At Dutch Flat he was robbed by well-known
hands from unknown motives. At Sacramento he was arrested on
suspicion of being something or other, and discharged with a severe
reprimand--possibly for not being it, and so delaying the course of
justice. At San Francisco he was freely stoned by children of the public
schools; but, by carefully avoiding these monuments of enlightened
progress, he at last reached, in comparative safety, the Chinese
quarters, where his abuse was confined to the police and limited by the
s