changes in the village, the most momentous to me was the
change in Yen Sin. I don't know why it should have been I, out of all
the Urkey youth, who went to the Chinaman's; perhaps it was the
spiritual itch left from that first adventure on the scow. At any rate,
I had fallen into a habit of dropping in at the cabin, and not always
with a collar to do.

I had succeeded in worming out of him the meaning of that first set of
bird-scratches on my collar-band--"The boy who throws clam-shells"--and
of a second and more elaborate writing--"The boy who is courageous in
the face of all the water of the ocean, yet trembles before so much of
it as may be poured in a wash-basin." There came a third inscription in
time, but of that he would not tell me, nor of Mate Snow's, nor the
minister's. It was a queer library he had, those fine-written collars of
Urkey village.

He had been growing feebler so long and so gradually that I had made
nothing of it. Once, I remember, it struck me queer that he wasn't
working so hard as he had used to. Still earliest of all and latest of
all, he would sometimes leave his iron cooling on the board now and
stand for minutes of the precious day, dreaming out of the harbor
window. When the sun was sinking, the shaft through the window bathed
his head and his lean neck with a quality almost barbaric, and for a
moment in the gloom made by the bright pencil, the new, raw things of
Urkey faded out, leaving him alone in his ancient and ordered
civilization, a little wistful, I think, and perhaps a little
frightened, as a child waking from a long, dreaming sleep, to find his
mother gone.

He had begun to talk about China, too, and the river where he was born.
And I made nothing of it, it came on so gradually, day by day. Then I
went away, as I have said, and came back again. I dropped in at the scow
the second day after the packet brought me home.

"Hello, there!" I cried, peeping over the counter, "I got a collar for
you to--to--" I began to stumble. "Mr. Yen Sin, dear me, what's the
matter of you?"

"Mista Yen Sin fine," he said in a strengthless voice, smiling and
nodding from the couch where he lay, half propped up by a gorgeous,
faded cushion. "Mista Yen Sin go back China way pletty quick now, yes."

"Honest?"

He made no further answer, but took up the collar I had brought.

"You been gone Gillypo't, yes? You take colla China boy, yes?"

"Yessir!"

"He pletty nice man, Sam Low, yes?"

"O