with apples and sandwiches (for dinner out was a terrible price) and
they took the tram down the south spurs to Leith or Grantown to find a
steamer. Each port was the dwelling-place of romance. Leith was a
squalid pack of black streets that debouched on a high brick wall
delightfully surmounted by mast-tops, and from every door there flashed
the cutlass gleam of the splendid sinister. Number 2, Sievering Street,
was an opium den. It was a corner house with Nottingham lace curtains
and a massive brown door that was always closed. You never would have
known it, but that was what it was. And once Ellen and her mother had
come back late and were taking a short cut through the alleys to the
terminus of the Edinburgh trams (one saved twopence by not taking the
Leith trams and had a sense of recovering the cost of the expedition),
and were half-way down a silent street when they heard behind them
flippety-flop, flippety-flop, stealthy and wicked as the human foot may
be. They turned and saw a great black figure, humped but still high,
keeping step with them a yard or so behind. Several times they turned,
terrified by that tread, and could make nothing more of it, till the
rays of a lamp showed them a tall Chinaman with a flat yellow face and a
slimy pigtail drooping with a dreadful waggish school-girlishness over
the shoulder of his blue nankin blouse; and long black eyes staring but
unshining. They were between the high blank walls of warehouses closed
for the night. They dared not run. Flippety-flop, flippety-flop, he came
after them, always keeping step. Leith Walk was a yellow glow a long way
off at the end of the street; it clarified into naphtha jets and roaring
salesmen and a crowd that slowly flocked up and down the roadway and was
channelled now and then by lumbering lighted cars; it became a
protecting jostle about them. Ellen turned and saw the Chinaman's flat
face creased with a grin. He had been savouring the women's terror under
his tongue, sucking unimaginable sweetness and refreshment from it. Mrs.
Melville was shedding angry tears and likening the Chinese to the