he gulf
yawned for me.

I shook my head.

"You can see it from all over the harbor," he informed me. "You don't
need shore-leave to see that temple."

I never loathed a temple so in my life. But I fixed that particular
temple at Rangoon.

"You can't see it from the harbor," I contradicted. "You can't see it
from the town. You can't see it from the top of the stairway.
Because--" I paused for the effect. "Because there isn't any temple
there."

"But I saw it with my own eyes!" he cried.

"That was in--?" I queried.

"Seventy-one."

"It was destroyed in the great earthquake of 1887," I explained. "It
was very old."

There was a pause. He was busy reconstructing in his old eyes the
youthful vision of that fair temple by the sea.

"The stairway is still there," I aided him. "You can see it from all
over the harbor. And you remember that little island on the right-hand
side coming into the harbor?" I guess there must have been one there
(I was prepared to shift it over to the left-hand side), for he
nodded. "Gone," I said. "Seven fathoms of water there now."

I had gained a moment for breath. While he pondered on time's changes,
I prepared the finishing touches of my story.

"You remember the custom-house at Bombay?"

He remembered it.

"Burned to the ground," I announced.

"Do you remember Jim Wan?" he came back at me.

"Dead," I said; but who the devil Jim Wan was I hadn't the slightest
idea.

I was on thin ice again.

"Do you remember Billy Harper, at Shanghai?" I queried back at him
quickly.

That aged sailorman worked hard to recollect, but the Billy Harper of
my imagination was beyond his faded memory.

"Of course you remember Billy Harper," I insisted. "Everybody knows
him. He's been there forty years. Well, he's still there, that's all."

And then the miracle happened. The sailorman remembered Billy Harper.
Perhaps there was a Billy Harper, and perhaps he had been in Shanghai
for forty years and was still there; but it was news to me.

For fully half an hour longer, the sailorman and I talked on in
similar fashion. In the end he told the policemen that I was what I
represented myself to be, and after a night's lodging and a breakfast
I was released to wander on westward to my married sister in San
Francisco.

But to return to the woman in Reno who opened her door to me in the
deepening twilight. At the first glimpse of her kindly face I took my
cue. I became a sweet, innocent, unfort