A crowd gathered around Jan and some one helped him to his feet. His chin was bleeding and his hands were scraped from hitting the cold pavement. He made no sign, however, of injury, but stood blinking in the direction the young woman with the cheap fur had gone. A policeman arrived and inquired sympathetically what was wrong. Jan brushed himself mechanically as the policeman spoke. Then he answered: "Nothing, I fell down." The policeman went away and Jan turned back to catch a Milwaukee Avenue street car. He stood on the corner waiting and fingering his bruised chin. He seemed to be getting impatient as the car failed to appear. Finally he thrust his hand inside his pocket and drew out the letter again. He held it without reading for an instant and then tore it up. When the car came Jan was still tearing up the letter, his thick fingers trying vainly to divide it into tinier bits. CORAL, AMBER AND JADE There are no gold and scarlet lanterns bobbing like fat little oriental Pierrots over this street. No firecracker colors daub its sad walls. Walk the whole length and not a dragon or a thumbnail balcony or a pigtail will you see. Instead, a very efficient, very conservative Chinatown and a colony of very efficient and very matter-of-fact Chinamen who have gradually taken possession of a small district around Twenty-second Street and Wentworth Avenue. A rather famous district in its way, where once the city's tenderloin put forth its red shadows. But now as you walk, the night stares evilly out of wooden ruins. Stretches of sagging, empty buildings, whose windows and doors seem to have been chewed away, an intimidating silence, a graveyard of crumbling little houses--these remain. And you see Venus, grown old and toothless, snoozing amid the debris of another day. Then the Chinamen begin. Lights twinkle. Clean-looking interiors and carefully washed store windows. Roofs have been hammered back in place, stairways nailed together again. The sagging walls and lopsided cottages have taken a new lease on life. Another of the innumerable little business districts that dot the city has fought its way into evidence. There are few oddities. Through the glass of the store fronts you see curiously immobile groups, men seated in chairs, smoking long pipes and waiting in silence. Strange fruits, foods, herbs, cloths, trinkets, lie on the orderly shelves around them. The floors look scrubbed and there is an absence of litter. It is all very efficient and very natural except for the immobility of the men in the chairs and the silence that seems to have descended on them. * * * * * A Chinese silence. And if you linger in the neighborhood you begin to feel that this is more Chinese than the gaudy dragons and the firecracker daubs and the bobbing paper lanterns of fiction.