ne of his favourite river trips, instead
of going back to his work.

The cool, sweet evening air might perhaps have done something towards
chasing Ping-Kwe's evil humour away, but alas! under the canopy of the
boat, within which he seated himself, he saw two English ladies, the
wife and sister of the British Consul in the district. Now Ping-Kwe
hated the English like poison and he thereupon began a tirade against
all foreigners, making use of as many English words as he could, for the
benefit of the two ladies.

Fortunately, his knowledge of the English language was limited, or Mrs.
Armstrong and Miss Heathcote might have been more alarmed than they
already were at his storm of abuse.

'What do we want with them here?' he snarled in his native tongue,
'turning the place upside down? If I had my will I would throw them all
overboard.'

'Calm yourself, Ping,' said one of his fellow-townsmen, Chang by name,
who was sitting near. 'Take my advice and throw something-else
overboard.'

Here he laid a restraining hand on the ill-tempered Chinaman's shoulder.

'What do you mean?' was the retort.

'Your bad temper; it will be the ruin of you if you don't.'

Alas! this open rebuke only added fuel to the fire, and Ping-Kwe's
fellow-passengers (who were bound for the town of Tsoung, across the
water) at length grew thoroughly tired of his company.

'Who is that fellow?' whispered one of the occupants of the boat to
another.

'Oh! it is Ping-Kwe,' was the reply, as though that answered everything.

'What! the manager of Kong-Yung's stores in the town yonder?'

'Yes.'

'How comes it that he is here, instead of attending to his work?' went
on the questioner.

As there was no satisfactory answer to this query, the stranger, who was
none other than Kong-Yung himself, said no more.

He had but lately come into his property, and so was not yet known to
all his tenants; but in these few minutes he had learnt enough to know
that Ping-Kwe was not the right sort of man to make a good manager.

Ping-Kwe, could he but have known it, would have given a year of his
life rather than show himself thus in his worst colours before his
wealthy employer. It was not the first time he had neglected his
business, but now his sin had found him out.

Perhaps Kong-Yung might have passed over this offence with a caution,
for he was not a hard man, but such a display of ill-temper was
unpardonable, and so it came to pass that early on the