after-yards and setting them for a run in on the larboard tack. They
handle gaskets, bunt-lines, leech-lines, fix her best bib and spencer,
like a country girl for a run up to town. Men are swarming about the
yards and rigging. That is not all: Lascars, stevedores, supercargoes,
the hong merchants, agents, are all busy breaking bulk. The India
opium is covered with petals of the plant and stowed in chests lined
with hides and covered with gunny; and these cases are locked in by
stays, spars and bulkheads to prevent jamming. Helter-skelter and
confusion alow and aloft, on the yards, rigging, deck, between decks
and under hatches. The captain and purser are gloating over the sycee
silver, for the Chinese government is as jealous of its exportation
as of the importation of opium; and the sky and the sea are dark and
angry. In a slovenly way the sails are trimmed, and she edges clumsily
around the point with the bullion and opium, the full freight and
gains of a year's voyaging and trading. Half an hour or an hour hence
she will be free, and the junk dropping down to sea with the drugs in
her. All at once a shriek or yell of "Hard aport!" and a great
iron outward-bound steamer from Hong-Kong bursts into the unwieldy
Chinaman, goes crunching through her like ripping pasteboard; tears
her open; snarls through steamy nostrils and cindery fiery mouth, and
growls over her wreck. And the sodden, stupefied merchantman, as if
drunk with opium, goes yelling and staggering with her sleepy drugs to
the bottom, and stays there, sycee silver and all.

From pricking his way across the Tartar plains, and probing in the
Dead Sea and eating its fruits, just to know that living crustaceae
could be found in one and pulpy flesh in the other, our Launfal,
looking for the Sangreal in chariot-wheels, wound his devious way to
the Flowery Kingdom, having tried a stroke or two at pearl-diving, and
given some valuable hints, that were wasted, in Red Sea fishing and