which choked and blinded me from sight of the pink and purple mist-veiled peaks. In a Mexican mine, at a shrine to the Virgin, cut in the rock where her lamp glowed through lasting night, It was the large white bead of my rosary of Job's Tears, which took my thoughts from prayer and broke my vows. Again, It was the mirage of Arizona midnights or noons, and I was one of the coyotes who leave their holes to howl. It was a spectre that strove to burden me with the secret of the pre-historic ruins of the Casa Grande. It brooded as a mist over the Colorado River while I hid in its depths-a corpse as if it might be my ghost. Here I could have been safe, since that stream does not give up its dead, but as a small bird I was forced to cross a wide sea, chased through days and nights by a great white gull. Lost in the jungle of a Chinese forest, I suddenly came to a clearing where beetle and glow-worm were staking out a grave for some one near and dear to me, whose death I could not hinder. I watched until they began to mark a second grave-oh, for whom? But I was torn from this sight, and thrust in the heart of a Chinese city. I wound through its crooked streets to a dark flight of steps, which came to an end; no rail, no step, darkness before I could get quite down; and I was again creeping from the top of a like staircase. Over and over I tried to go down these vanishing stairs. At last, I was faced suddenly, as if he sprang through a trapdoor, by a huge white form that tried to tell me something, some strange fact linked with my fate, which would explain a secret that had long chafed me. But what? I shook with fearTong-ko-lin-sing spoke to me. I woke. My first glance fell on the pure, sweet-scented lily, calm and fair, in its clear, glass bowl, and the relief was so great that tears sprang to my eyes. ACT I. "No; but he gains his wishes because he is brave enough to try and fight what he calls doom." "That is not the only point on which you differ." "No; but we are too fond of each other to quarrel." "Even Fate could not break your friendship?" "Never. I defy it." "It is as good as a fortune to be sure of one's self," she said, looking at me for an instant with such approval that I was bewitched enough to have spoken my love if others had not come in, and we soon strolled home. Her shy, brief glances stirred my brain like wine. Was it true that the woman who could look long in a man's eyes could not love him? I sighed with joy. I was in the gay mood which the Scotch think comes just before ill luck. It had been a very happy day. I had taken her to drive in the Park in the morning; I had found her in the picture-store in the afternoon. As we went up our boarding-house steps, I felt that the world was made for me. As she passed through the storm-door before me, I stayed for mere lightness of heart to drop a gold piece in the apron of Nora, the neat Irish nurse-girl, sitting outside with Elinor's little cousins. Elinor had glided so far alone that Si-ki, coming toward her with a card that had been left for her, did not see me. I watched him, thinking of what Nora had told of his skill in making melon-seed fowls, and carving flowers from vegetables, and of her dislike for his hue-"like an old green copper," she said. He did have an odd sort of tea-color to his skin, not unlike that of morphine-lovers, but I thought he looked no worse than Nora with her face like a globe-fish. Elinor, with "Was it not Fate, whose name is also Sor- hand on the newel, paused to look at the card. row?" said Elinor. We were looking at Randolph Rogers's "Lost Pleiad," in the inner room of Morris & Schwab's picture-store. "No," said I, kindling at a glance from her fine eyes; "Fate is well named when in one's favor, but can not be truly against one. I could master it; so could others. Man rules his own life-it need not depend on others- he gains what he strives for, and need never yield to evil forces." "Then you have no pity for the man who killed another here yesterday?" Amazed and angry, I saw Si-ki dare to lay his hand on hers, saying, "Nicey! Nicey!” Elinor's hand-that I had not yet held but as any one might, in a dance, or to help her from a carriage! The sight filled me with such rage, that, just as I would have brushed a gnat out of the world, I sprang on Si-ki and began beating him. I was in such fury that I scarcely knew when Elinor and Nora fled, or that the French lady hung over the railing up-stairs, in her white frilled wrapper, with but one of her diamond sparks in her ears, and her hair half dressed, crying to heaven; that the Spanish | hear of their 'high-binders' and other secret societies. You have not known the last of that cur you whipped." lady stood in the parlor-door, clapping her hands; that the German professor opening his door, the Italian merchant running down-stairs, the English banker, the American broker, and my friend Brande, coming in from the street, all tried to stop me. "Keep back! It is a matter between us two!" I answered them all. "Between us two!" timing my blows to my words. I thrashed him till my cane snapped in two. "Between us two!" I turned him out. "Between us two!" I | cried, and flung him down the steps. "Be- | tween us two!" I muttered to myself as I went up-stairs to my room, with a passing glimpse of Elinor, disturbed and blushing, in the doorway of her aunt's room. She did not come to dinner. The foreign boarders were shocked or excited; the others amused or unmoved; the landlady was vexed. I was filled with shame to have spent so much force and feeling on such a wretch, and to have distressed Elinor by setting all these tongues in motion about her; to think that I, Yorke Rhys, high-born and high-bred, should have deigned to so beat a creature of no more worth in the world than a worm. But, as I told Brande that night in my room, I had a strange dislike for Si-ki. "He was too cat-like," I said, "with his grave air, his slyness and soft tread, his self-contained cunning." "Yes," said Brande; "our rough classes are like the larger kind of beast; those of the Chinese are like rats and gophers—the timid, wiry, alert creatures who pose on their hind-legs in nursery-tale pictures." "They look like a child's drawing on a slate," I said; "outlines of a man, in square-cut robes." "But that Chinese teacher of yours is worse," said he; "dark as if the gloom of ages had taken man's shape, with as still motion, locked behind his reserve as if cased in mail. It is like dealing with ghost or sphinx." "He shows the effect of inherited civilization," said I; "dignified, priestly, close-mouthed as if his millions of ancestors in him frowned at me as one of a short-lived race, a sort of Mormon-fly with its life of one night." "He and the Chinese grammar both would be too much for me to meet," said Brande. "But they have each their charm," I said. "The grammar shows the hidden working of the mind, the laws of thought." "That early hieroglyphic you told me about," said he, "of folding-doors and an ear, which meant 'to listen,' shows the same law of thought that our landlady has. What hidden force let her have only raw coolies for months after she sent off a trained servant for his thefts? We "Pshaw! I soon start for China any way," said I, "glad of the pay promised me there for three years, and tired of roughing it in Nevada, Colorado, and Arizona; but I wish I wish I could have had a chance with your friends on California Street." "I wish you had," he said; "but never mind. You will have gained the Chinese language, and, judging by your feat of to-day, the Chinamen had better not cross your path. Was it for this we moved to this house of seven gabbles?" I "For this," I answered, glumly. "Why did we move?" For we were scarcely settled. came to be near Elinor, and Brande because he wished to be with me. "There is the cause," he said, nodding toward the window as a gust of wind swept by. "People wonder at the roving impulse of the San Franciscans. It is the wind which urges and compels them to arise and go; it has even driven me to try and mock the monotone of its chant." He took from his pocket and read to me these lines: Again low sighs (no bliss of love attaining) That gain the longing lips of lorn Elayne. Though rain, though sun thine own rapt mood sustaining Moraine may lock, or iceberg rent in twain; With strain of distant bells that chimes maintain Like plaintive fall of castles built in Spain. O'erlain with laugh and yell and sob complaining, The train of sound is broken, scattered, slain. Regain, constrain to far and further waningRefrain! Refrain ! How reign such fancies? By thy weird ordaining, To train of ancestors whose acts enchain- Through wane of ages though no clue is plain; Or main in tumult as chance gales constrain, As he ceased, the wind, which had thrust in its undertone of sympathy, rose so strongly that the house trembled like a boat, and in the close, creeping fog we might have been far out at sea for any sign to be seen of the city below us. We sat in silence, broken suddenly by a quick, urgent knocking. Brande opened the door. Elinor's aunt stood there, looking wild. Without heeding him, she called to me: "How could you do it? Why did you do it?" Chased by Brande as by a shadow, I in turn tracked two policemen, through a network of horror like a nightmare-through the foreign city in the heart of San Francisco like a clingstone in its peach. In single file, dropping story below story under the side-walks, we slipped and stumbled in mildew, damp, and dirt, where the coolies flitted round like gnomes, where no window let in light, no drain bore off bad air. We searched narrow galleries running everywhere, often bridging each other like those of an ant-hill, and dark ways where but one could pass. We bent at door-ways that barred our path at sudden turns, peered into vile dens that lined the way, and, choking and strangling, climbed above ground, where we scanned the thousands of workmen in the many boot and shoe factories and cigar-works; hunted through the numberless gambling-hells, but could not pass the old watchman, with wrinkled face like a baked apple, sitting on a stool in front of a red curtain (the color for luck), before he jerked the cord dangling near him, when bells warned, doors were barred, bolts shot like lightning, door upon door suddenly thrust itself across our path, or a screen slyly slid before us, turning us unaware into another passage. In this way, through secret signs, the whole groundplan of a building would shift and dupe like a mirage. We might at last find a group of men merely talking, with neither dice, domino, dragon or demon-pictured parchment card, button, nor brass ring, in sight-no copper with square centre hole, nor other trace of Fan-Tan; or find such utter darkness that fear seized us and drove us out. We viewed their pent, full work-shops and boarding-houses, each story refloored once or twice between the first floor "What do you mean?" asked Brande, while and ceiling, and their lodgings where they are I stood in speechless wonder. "I mean," said she, still looking at me, "that Nora brought some Chinese sweetmeats that shelved in tiers. We tried to find their courts of justice, but found secret laws within our laws, like puzzle in puzzle, and all in charge of the six-headed chief power, the strong Six Com- | lin-sing darted out again, shaking his fore-finger panies, from whose joint decree there is no appeal. All hedged from us by a Great Wallof their language, for what I heard spoken was not the written language I had learned from books-and of their ways, formed by such long, slow growth that it is the soul of their past ages which still lives, it is the same Chinese who lived before the flood who watch us now. Worn-out, Brande and I started for home, but on the way stopped to see Tong-kolin-sing. He had been playing chess with his friend Si Hung Chang, who left as we went in, and he packed the chess-men in their box while he heard our tale, but said nothing. His face was a clear blank when Brande asked about secret societies. I tried all forms of begging and urging I could think of. He would not know what we meant. He offered us cigars, and took his pipe as if he wished us to go-his own pipe, with a small tube on one side in which to burn an opium-pill. Too dear to him to trust in the hands of a “foreign devil," I had not been given a chance to touch it. Brande laid a large gold-piece on the table. Tong-kolin-sing smiled, wavered, but sank back into grave silence. Brande poured forth a stream of abuse. Tong-ko-lin-sing, bland and deaf, eyed his Lianchau coffin with pride, and fell into deep thought. I opened the door, and signed to Brande to follow me. He did so, swearing at the whole Chinese race as sly fools. We were half way down-stairs, when Tong-kolin-sing shuffled out on the landing and called after us, the English words having a queer effect of centred force when intoned like Chinese: "Red-haired devils! barbarians! all of you! Like bears beating their stupid heads against the Great Wall. Are the black-haired people not your betters? Great in mind as in numbers, did we not make paper and ink, and print, a thousand years before your time?—and travel by a compass more than twenty-five hundred years before your Christ?" He shuffled back, but swung out again to add, "Do we not excel in dyes, in sugar, in porcelain, gunpowder, and fire-works?" He started toward his room, but turned back to cry, "Think of our secrets in the working of metals, our triumphs in the casting of bells, our magic mirrors which reflect what is wrought on their backs!" He seemed to have really done this time, but stopped in his door for this boast: "Look at our silk, cotton, linen, engraved wood and iron, carved ivory, bronze antiques, fine lacquer-work! We make as brilliant figures in the universe as our rare colors on our famous pith-paper!" His grand air struck Brande as so absurd that in his nervous excitement he laughed. Tong-ko at us, as if in the Chinese game of Fi-fi, or like our "Fie! for shame!" "You foreign devils would be wiser than your forefathers. You care nothing for the sages of old. What do you know of our three thousand rules and forms? You need a tribunal like ours at Peking, a Board of Rites!" Going through his door, he called over his shoulder, "What is your poor country? Not fit for our graves! To be happy on earth one must be born in Suchow, live in Canton, and die in Lianchau. T-r-r-r! Begone!" I had gone back a few steps, and could see into his room. I heard a chuckle as his wide sleeve swept carelessly over the table as he went by it. He passed on. There was no money there. "Who could have foreseen such a lecture from a jumping-jack in brocade drawers, tight to the ankle, and a loose blouse?" said Brande, as we hurried home. "He has the wholly irresponsible air of a clothier's sign-suit swinging in the wind, but he knows the points of the compass!" We found Elinor seemed to have changed for the worse and still senseless. After Brande left me I sat in my window, too sad and too tired to go to rest. I saw Goat Island loom large, but blurred by fog, like Heine's phantom isle, faint in the moonshine, where mists danced and sweet tones rang, but the lovers swam by, unblest, off into the wide sea. Elinor and I, too, had touched no isle of bliss, but passed comfortless into a sea of uncertainty which might widen into eternity. Sweet as it had been to be on the brink of owning our love, what would I not have given now to have some fond words?-even but one kiss, to recall in time to come if I could not think of such a loss. I lighted my room, and tried to read or write, but in vain. I only thought of her. "Oh!" I groaned, "if I could have had some proof that she loved me!" As I sat, I saw in a long mirror the door behind me open, and-Elinor come! In misty white trailing robe, she looked unreal. Could it be, I thought, that they had left her alone to leave her room in a trance? A thrill of joy shot through me that she should even unconsciously come straight to me. I sprang to my feet and turned toward her-to find I was alone! I sank again in my chair. Was I losing my wits? No-she was therethere in the mirror, looking at me with the deepest woe in her face! She reached her arms toward me as if she longed to embrace me, and looked so sorry, so sorry for me. "Did I stay with Tong-ko-lin-sing, and take opium again?" I murmured. She made a gesture of farewell and half turned to go. "Elinor! Elinor!" I cried. A spasm of grief crossed her face. Filled with wonder, sorrow, and surprise, I rose again, but she made a motion of despair and left the room before I could turn. Did she go? Was she there, or was my brain wild? My own shadow, crossing the ceiling toward the door as I moved, startled me. Had I not read of the ill will between shadows and the beings that live in mirrors? Mad I should surely be if I stayed longer alone; yet I opened the door most unwillingly. The dim hall was still and vacant. I went to Elinor's door. Her aunt said for the last half hour they had not felt sure she was not dead, but there had just come back signs of life; they could see that she breathed again. The doctor had slight hope. She gave me a slip of paper covered with Elinor's dainty penciling. "I found that in Elinor's pocket," she said, "in the dress she wore when out with you yesterday. I thought you would like to read it." And the grim, old woman really looked with pity at me. I wrung her hand, and rushed to my room to read: THE LOST PLEIAD. Like blossom floating down restraining stream. Through vast cloud-spaces up and down I wheel, Is like the rest the immortals ever know. Through haste and strife his life can merely plan. His life, like that reflected in a glass, Knows not the sweep of that among the gods- Must some time fix on each with baleful glow. Forlorn, I fail for ever Pleiad height Float downward just above the phantom realm Where Fame and Beauty, Love and Power, take flight, Fate ever whirling after to o'erwhelm. See rise the Day's bold crown, Or muffled Night with stolen stars slink down! With slow pulse poise while moonless midnights pass, By memory painted, that sweet time-alas!- Which sends me drifting down the cloud-sea's swell! "It can not be!" I cried, with bursting heart. "Our drama is not ended. Somewhere, some time, it must go on, even though she passes now behind the green curtain of a grassy grave!" ACT III. The next day found no change in Elinor, and found us again with the policemen, hunting Chinatown. Standing on corners while a drove of coolies passed, crowding and bleating like sheep, or the din of funeral music jarred on our nerves; down in cellars, damp and green and gloomy as sea-caves, and the roar of the city overhead not unlike that of the sea; up on roofs as cheerless to live on as leafless trees, but full of coolies, like chattering monkeys-no jungle of a Chinese forest less fit for human life. And through it all I was haunted by thoughts of happy hours I had passed with Elinor, which came back like scenes in another life, as if I had already gone down to helldewy garden-alleys with fountains and whispering shrubs, blossoms and bird-songs, radiance, bloom and sweet scent, all that gave a charm to life-unlike this foul quarter as a perfect poem to vile doggerel, music to discord, light to dark. One Chinaman we saw everywhere; on a corner across the way; at the head of steps as we were coming up; at the foot of the stairs when we were on a roof; bowing at a shrine with gold and saffron legends and scarlet streamers round the door, and through the dim inner light and scent of burning sandalwood, the gleam of tinsel and flare of lamp, before an ugly image; in one of what Brande called their chop-(stick)-houses, feasting on shark's-fin or bird's-nest soup; watching a group in a wash-house who play Fi-fi to see who shall pay for a treat of tea; in a barber-shop, among those undergoing dainty cleansing of eyes, ears, and nostrils, trimming and penciling of eyebrows and lashes; or at a market-stall (kept in the window of some other kind of shop), haggling for pork, or fish, or fowl-its only stock; always in the back-ground of our scene, even |