incalculable problem, finally spoke: “I suppose, if this revolt should bring serious trouble to Kang, it might affect you and me as well.”      

       The captain flared up, the blustering note rising higher in his voice.       “But somebody'll have to run the boats, won't they?”      

       “If they run at all.”      

       His impersonal tone seemed to irritate further the captain's troubled spirit. “If they run at all, eh? It's all right for you—you can go it alone—you haven't got children on your mind, young ones!”      

       The big man was silent again. A great hand gripped a stanchion tightly as he gazed out at the dark expanse of water. The captain, glancing around at him, looking a second time at that hand, turned away, with a little sound.     

       “I will say good night,” remarked the mate abruptly, and left his chief to his uncertain thoughts.     

       The steamer moved deliberately out into the wide estuary of the Yangtze, which is at this point like a sea. Squatting at the edge of the deck, outside the rail, the pilot spoke musically to the Chinese quartermaster. Slowly, a little at a time, as she plowed the ruffling water, the steamer swung off to the northwest to begin her long journey up the mighty river to Hankow where the passengers would change for the smaller Ichang steamer, or for the express to Peking over the still novel trunk railway. And if, as happened not infrequently, the Yen Hsin should break down or stick in the mud, the Peking passengers would wait a week about the round stove in the old Astor House at Hankow for the next express.     

       A mighty river indeed, is the Yangtze. During half the year battle-ships of reasonably deep draught may reach Hankow. In the heyday of the sailing trade clippers out of New York and blunt lime-juicers out of Liverpool were any day sights from the bund there. Through a busy and not seldom bloody century the merchants of a clamorous outside world have roved the great river (where yellow merchants of the Middle Kingdom, in sampan, barge and junk, roved fifty centuries before them) with rich cargoes of tea (in leaden chests that bore historic ideographs on the enclosing matting)—with hides and horns and coal from Hupeh and furs and musk from far-away Szechuen, with soya beans and rice and bristles 

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