g that when I took off the first
covering and the second, I found that the contents had suffered no
wetting.

The first bundle contained the violin which had incensed the captain and
several packages of extra strings. As I took it out, I seemed to hear
again its plaintive, wordless song and I laid it down reverently. It
seemed a part of the dead man's soul--something intimate and wonderful
which had outlasted his mortality.

In the second package was something wrapped in tissue paper and very
soft to the touch. I opened it and spread out on the sand a gorgeously
wrought Mandarin kimono. Its silk was of the heaviest and richest
quality and its design flamed with the unstinted opulence of Chinese
embroidery. On the flowing sleeves and bordered panels were storks of
blue and silver flying among poppy-like flowers of crimson purple. There
were also delicately worked streams and reeds and moons, all tangled up
with ranting dragons of gold, gazing fiercely out from eyes of inset
jade. Gold thread, silver thread, silk thread, cunningly combined to the
making of its dazzling pattern.

Some celestial dignitary had once ordered its embroidering and, perhaps,
had ridden upon his palanquin garbed in its splendor with the pride of a
peacock in his narrow, slanting eyes. It seemed to me, kneeling there in
my torn pajamas, my knees and elbows bruised, my stomach rebelling
against rank food, that I could see the whole picture of which this
garment had once been a brilliant detail. There were shouting coolies
running ahead with huge bamboo staves to clear the way. The grandee's
chair, crusted with carving, was borne along in state. I could picture
paper lanterns swinging from slender poles and plum blossoms awave and
smell the heavy reek of burning incense, and at the thought of all this
arrogant luxury I suffered as though I were struggling through a
nightmare. The young derelict of the _Wastrel_ had, in all likelihood,
bargained for it and haggled over its cost in an Oriental shop. He had
finally bought it for a gift to a wife or sweetheart, and even with
capable bargaining it must have been a purchase beyond his means. Now
in futile magnificence it lay outspread before me who was sea-wrecked
and fighting hunger. In the same package, however, I found my first
useful articles: a small block of those miniature matches that one may
buy in the Chinatown sections of San Francisco or New York, which burn
with an odious reek of sulphur. I