of those lovely spots, as she lies along her crescent bay, from Mount
Nillau to Mount Charil, defended by the frowning forts of Sam Francisco
and Our Lady of Bom Parto. Beautiful as this picture is, it was doubly
so in the brilliant sunset colouring of a certain March day, as the
steamer slowly came to her wharf and the passengers stepped ashore
beneath the blue and white flag of Portugal, in this, her farthest
eastern possession. The houses with their delicate washings of pink,
blue, yellow or green, with white stucco ornaments, now golden in the
light, had a warmth of colouring well set off by the dark foliage of
camphor and banyan trees showing above the garden walls. The few
passengers soon dispersed, in chairs or on foot, leaving but one of
their number upon the wharf. He was apparently expecting some one to
come for him, for he refused all offers of assistance from the coolies
and seated himself just outside the gate. American, of medium height,
brown haired and tanned by a tropical sun, Robert Adams was as good a
specimen of Anglo Saxon youth as England herself could boast of. He was
the last descendant of a New England family, which had preserved its
purity for three centuries as unmixed with continental blood as though
the three centuries had been passed in the quiet vales of Devon, instead
of in the New World with its broken barriers.

For three years, after a successful college course, he had been in the
only shipping house in Hong Kong which sickly American commerce of the
day was able to support in the once flourishing China trade. A small
fortune and a good salary, a constitution which even an Eastern summer
could not break down, and above all, the heart of the girl he loved,
were surely possessions which any king might envy him. Presently a neat
bamboo chair borne by three liveried coolies came at a trot down the
street, and being placed before this last of the passengers, carried him
away into the darkness which, with the suddenness of the tropics, had