made the essay?" demanded Lieu with undiminished confidence. "In these affairs it is often the least likely that respond phenomenally. Were it not that a notorious huckster is at this moment turning over my stock with widespread disparagement, I could astonish you out of the storehouse of my adventurous past. In the meanwhile, apply this salutary plaster to your rising ardour: could I have but shown five taels of silver, she whom I coveted was mine, and yet in the event she slipped hence from me; but this one of thine is by my certain information a daughter of the affluent house of Tai, and a golden chain and shackle would not bridge the space between her father's views and your own lowly station."
"Her place is set among the more brilliant stars," agreed Ming briefly. "Nevertheless," he added with a new-born note of hope, "is it not written within the Books, 'However far the heaven, the eye can reach it'?"
"Assuredly," replied Lieu, pausing in his departure to return a step, "the eye, Ming Tseuen—but not likewise the hand." And endeavouring to impart an added meaning to his words by a rapid movement of the nearer eyelid, the genial-witted dog-butcher went on his way, leaving Ming with an inward conviction that he was not a person of delicate perception or one with whom it would be well to associate too freely in the future.
It is aptly said, "After the lightning comes the thunder," and events of a momentous trend were by no means lagging behind Ming's steps that day. Even while he contended with the self-opinionated Lieu, in a distant quarter of the city a wealthy lacquer merchant, Kwok Shen by name, was seeking to shape afresh this obscure and unknown youth's immediate fate, urged by the pressing mould of his own insistent need. "It is easier for a gnat to bend a marble tower than for a man to turn destiny aside,” pronounced the Venerable, the Sagacious
