d appeared. The ship swung into the dock, disclosing to the
questioning eyes of Kan Won and his kind a new strange land. In orderly
discipline they were marched off the vessel and on to the dock. But rest
was not theirs as yet, nor was this their final destination. From the
fire junk they boarded the flying iron horse of the Foreign Devils;
again they were on the move. Swiftly across the land they went, over
high mountains crowded with eternal snow, thence down upon brown,
rolling plains as wide as the flat stretches of the broad Yangtze
Valley; eastward, ever eastward, through a land sparsely peopled for all
its virgin fertility. Behind their flying progress the days
dropped--one, two, three, four, at last five; and then they entered a
more populous region. Kan Wong, his nose flattened against the glass
that held the moving picture as in a frame, wondered much at the magic
that unrolled to his never-sated eyes. Yet the journey's end was beyond
his questioning.

Once more they came to a seaport. Marching from the carriages, once more
they beheld the sea. But this time it was different--more turbulent,
harsher, more sombre with the hint of waiting storms. Was there, then,
more than one ocean, Kan Wong asked himself? He found that it was indeed
so when once more a fire junk received them. This one was greyer than
the first that they had known. Upon her decks were guns and at her side
were other junks, low, menacing, with a demon flurry of vicious speed,
and short, squat funnels that belched dense smoke clouds. Within the
town were many Foreign Devils, all dressed alike in strange drab
uniforms; on the docks and here and there at other places they bore
arms and other unmistakable equipment of fighting men, which even Kan
Wong could not but notice.

The grey ship moved into a cold grey fog. With it other ships as grey
and as crowded, ships that crawled with men, strange Foreign Devils who
clanked with weapons as they walked aboard. Again a waste of water,
through which the ship seemed to crawl with a caution that Kan Wong
felt, but did not understand. With it on either side, moved those other
junks--squat, menacing, standing low on the horizon, but as haunting as
dark ghosts. Where were they bound, this strangely mixed fleet? Often
Kan Wong pondered this, but gave it no tongue to his fellow-passengers,
holding a bit aloof from them by virtue of his caste.

Again they neared the shore, where other boats, low-built and bris