out joyfully, "Ah! my
brother, what a joy to meet you once more! How glad I am to see you!"

To his astonishment, Lo-yung, with a frown upon his face, angrily
exclaimed; "You common fellow, what do you mean by calling me your
brother? I have no brother. You are an impostor, and you must be
severely punished for daring to claim kinship with me."

Calling some of the lictors in his train, he ordered them to beat Keng,
and then cast him into prison, and to give strict injunctions to the
jailer to treat him as a dangerous criminal. Wounded and bleeding from
the severe scourging he had received, and in a terrible state of
exhaustion, poor Keng was dragged to the prison, where he was thrown
into the deepest dungeon, and left to recover as best he might from the
shock he had sustained.

His condition was indeed a pitiable one. Those who could have helped
and comforted him were far away. He could expect no alleviation of his
sorrows from the jailer, for the heart of the latter had naturally
become hardened by having to deal with the criminal classes. Besides
he had received precise orders from the great mandarin, that this
particular prisoner was to be treated as a danger to society. Even if
he had been inclined to deal mercifully with him, he dared not disobey
such definite and stringent commands as he had received from his
superior.

The prison fare was only just enough to keep body and soul together.
Keng had no money with which to bribe the jailer to give him a more
generous diet, and there was no one to guarantee that any extra
expenses which might be incurred would ever be refunded to him.

And then a miracle was wrought, and once more the fairies interfered,
this time to save the life of the only son of the man whose fame for
tenderness and compassion had reached the far-off Western Heaven.

One morning, as Keng lay weary and half-starved on the blackened heap
of straw that served him as a bed in the corner of the prison, a monkey
climbed up and clung to the narrow gratings through which the light
penetrated into his room. In one of its hands it held a piece of pork
which it kept offering to Keng. Very much surprised, he got up to take
it, when to his delight he discovered that the monkey was the identical
one which had been picked up by his father on the day of the great
flood.

The same thing was repeated for several days in succession, and when
the jailer asked for some explanation of these extraord