It was dead of night and midwinter. A frightful wind was bringing
sleet from the East. The long sere grasses were wailing. Two specks
of light appeared on the desolate plain; a man in a hansom cab was
driving alone in North China.

Alone with the driver and the dejected horse. The driver wore a good
waterproof cape, and of course an oiled silk hat, but the man in the
cab wore nothing but evening dress. He did not have the glass door
down because the horse fell so frequently, the sleet had put his cigar
out and it was too cold to sleep; the two lamps flared in the wind.
By the uncertain light of a candle lamp that flickered inside the cab,
a Manchu shepherd that saw the vehicle pass, where he watched his
sheep on the plain in fear of the wolves, for the first time saw
evening dress. And though he saw if dimly, and what he saw was wet,
it was like a backward glance of a thousand years, for as his
civilization is so much older than ours they have presumably passed
through all that kind of thing.

He watched it stoically, not wondering at a new thing, if indeed it be
new to China, meditated on it awhile in a manner strange to us, and
when he had added to his philosophy what little could be derived from
the sight of this hansom cab, returned to his contemplation of that
night's chances of wolves and to such occasional thoughts as he drew
at times for his comfort out of the legends of China, that have been
preserved for such uses. And on such a night their comfort was
greatly needed. He thought of the legend of a dragon-lady, more fair
than the flowers are, without an equal amongst daughters of men,
humanly lovely to look on although her sire was a dragon, yet one who
traced his descent from gods of the elder days, and so it was that she