well set off by the dark foliage of camphor and banyan trees showing above the garden walls. The few passengers soon dispersed, in chairs or on foot, leaving but one of their number upon the wharf. He was apparently expecting some one to come for him, for he refused all offers of assistance from the coolies and seated himself just outside the gate. American, of medium height, brown[Pg 9] haired and tanned by a tropical sun, Robert Adams was as good a specimen of Anglo Saxon youth as England herself could boast of. He was the last descendant of a New England family, which had preserved its purity for three centuries as unmixed with continental blood as though the three centuries had been passed in the quiet vales of Devon, instead of in the New World with its broken barriers.

[Pg 9]

For three years, after a successful college course, he had been in the only shipping house in Hong Kong which sickly American commerce of the day was able to support in the once flourishing China trade. A small fortune and a good salary, a constitution which even an Eastern summer could not break down, and above all, the heart of the girl he loved, were surely possessions which any king might envy him. Presently a neat bamboo chair borne by three liveried coolies came at a trot down the street, and being placed before this last of the passengers, carried him away into the darkness which, with the suddenness of the tropics, had fallen upon the city. The stillness was broken only by the noise of escaping steam from the boat and the regular patter of the barefooted chair carriers. When the chair had disappeared up the narrow, winding street, a Portuguese wrapped in a black cloak came from behind a wall, then by another way walked rapidly over the hill and[Pg 10] down the other side to the Praya, arriving in front of one of the largest houses on that most beautiful promenade just as the coolies put down their burden.

[Pg 10]

The oil lamps along the Praya had been lighted, stretching out to the Estrada Sam Francisco, where the bright windows in the hospital of Sam Januarius seemed to be the lake of lights into which this long stream flowed. No one was abroad, no steps sounded along the pavement except those of the sentry as he walked, and smoked, before the neighbouring residence of the Governor. Death at night and sleep in the day time are the characteristics of Macao. No one seems to work, play, sing, dance or even read unless the latter indeed may be done in what Alphonse Daudet calls la Bibliotheque des cigales.

As Robert Adams stepped from the chair, the 

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