e he out it into words.

The meanest story receives something vital in its constitution when it
is told with all the force and conviction of years of hatred behind the
simple fact of expression, and the story that Leh Shin recounted to
Shiraz was a mean story. The Chinaman had the true Eastern capacity for
remembering the least item in the long account that lay unsettled
between himself and the Burman. His memory was a safe in which the
smallest fact connected with it was kept intact and his mind traversed
an interminable road of detail.

The two men had begun life as friends. The friendship between them dated
back to the days when Leh Shin and Mhtoon Pah were small boys running
together in the streets of Mangadone, and no antipathy that is a first
instinct has ever the depth of root given to the bitterness that can
spring from a breach in long friendship, and Leh Shin and Mhtoon Pah
hated as only old friends ever do hate.

Leh Shin started in life with all the advantages that Mhtoon Pah lacked,
and he appreciated the slavish friendship of the Burman, which grew with
years. Mhtoon Pah became a clerk on scanty pay in the employ of a rice
firm, and Leh Shin, at his father's death, became sole owner of the
house in Paradise Street; no insignificant heritage, as it was stocked
with a store of things that increased in value with age, and in the
guise of his greatest friend Mhtoon Pah was made welcome at the shop
whenever he had time to go there. From his clerkship in the firm of rice
merchants Mhtoon Pah, at the insistence of his friend, became part
partner in the increasing destiny of the curio shop. He travelled for
Leh Shin, and brought back wares and stores in days when railways were
only just beginning to be heard of, and it was difficult and even
dangerous to bring goods across the Shan frontier. He had the control of
a credit trust, though not of actual money, and for a time the
partnership prospered. Mhtoon Pah was always conscious that he was a
subordinate depending on the good will of his principal, and even as he
ate with cunning into the heart of the fruit, the outside skin showed no
trace of his ravages. Leh Shin's belief in his friend's integrity made
him careless in the matter of looking into things for himself, and
lulled into false security, he dreamed that he prospered; his dream
being solidified by the accounts which he received from the Burman. In
the zenith of his affluence he married the daughter of a