while a man behind it wrote down certain things about me on a slate. One of my captors said:

   "Enter a charge against this Chinaman of being disorderly and disturbing the peace."

   I attempted to say a word, but he said:

   "Silence! Now ye had better go slow, my good fellow. This is two or three times you've tried to get off some of your d—-d insolence. Lip won't do here. You've got to simmer down, and if you don't take to it paceable we'll see if we can't make you. Fat's your name?"

   "Ah Song Hi."

   "Alias what?"

   I said I did not understand, and he said what he wanted was my true name, for he guessed I picked up this one since I stole my last chickens. They all laughed loudly at that.

   Then they searched me. They found nothing, of course. They seemed very angry and asked who I supposed would "go my bail or pay my fine." When they explained these things to me, I said I had done nobody any harm, and why should I need to have bail or pay a fine? Both of them kicked me and warned me that I would find it to my advantage to try and be as civil as convenient. I protested that I had not meant anything disrespectful. Then one of them took me to one side and said:

   "Now look here, Johnny, it's no use you playing softly wid us. We mane business, ye know; and the sooner ye put us on the scent of a V, the asier yell save yerself from a dale of trouble. Ye can't get out o' this for anny less. Who's your frinds?"

   I told him I had not a single friend in all the land of America, and that I was far from home and help, and very poor. And I begged him to let me go.

   He gathered the slack of my blouse collar in his grip and jerked and shoved and hauled at me across the dungeon, and then unlocking an iron cell-gate thrust me in with a kick and said:

   "Rot there, ye furrin spawn, till ye lairn that there's no room in America for the likes of ye or your nation."

   DEAR CHING-FOO: You will remember that I had just been thrust violently into a cell in the city prison when I wrote last. I stumbled and fell on some one. I got a blow and a curse= and on top of these a kick or two and a shove. In a second or two it was plain that I was in a nest of prisoners and was being "passed around"—for 

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