izarre way.

"It's bully!" he exclaimed, pirouetting with one hand on his head after
the style of the matador.

"It is bully!" she echoed, in such quaint reflection of his exclamation
that Peter laughed outright. "Now, sit down again, sar," she invited.
And when Peter had again disposed himself at the side of this
light-hearted young person, she went on:

"I am coming a long, long way to visit my aged grandmother (may the
green-eyed gods grant her the twelve desires!) who lives Canton-way.
My dear father sells opium. He has grown rich in that trade, even
though the stupid eyes of the Dutch _babis_ are on him all the while.
When I have seen my ancient grandmother, and given her geefts, I will
go home, to the south, Macassar-way."

"Now, where, oh where, do I fit in this scheme?" was what Peter
thought. "What have I that this maiden desires?"

"Ah, _busar satu_!" the maiden was saying, deftly and unaffectedly
patting the sarong. "It is bully! And now----"

"And now----" intoned Peter calmly, for even as a life pays for a life,
and an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, so does a gift pay for
a gift.

"And now," went on the maid from Macassar, whose father had grown rich
in the opium-trade under the very eyes of the Dutch, "tell me but one
thing, my lord--is Hong Kong safe for such as I?"

"When one is young and virtuous," spake Peter in the drone of an
ancient fortune-teller, "one keeps her eyes pinned on the front. One
hears nothing; and one becomes as discreet of tongue as the little blue
sphinx at Chow-Fen-Chu."

"Those are the words of Confucius, the wise one," retorted the little
bell-like voice with a tinkling laugh. "I need no guide, then? I have
heard that China is unsafe. That is why I asked."

"Small one," replied Peter, with a smile of gravity and with much
candor in his blue eyes, "in China, such a one as you are as safe as a
Javanese starling in a nest of hungry yellow snakes. You will travel
by daylight, or not at all. You will go from Kowloon to your venerable
grandmother by train. You will carry a knife, and you will use it
without hesitation. Have you such a knife?"

The small head bowed vehemently.

"In Hong-Kong you will go aboard a sampan and be rowed Kowloon-way,
from whence the train runs by the great river to Canton."

"That will be safe, that sampan?"

"I will make it safe, small one. For I will go with you as far as
Kowloon, if that is what you wish."

"And d