I had stood so about a quarter of an hour, as I suppose, and was listening to a long roll of thunder that seemed to shake the very foundations of these palsied buildings when, as if answering to the call of the storm, there arose within the house behind me a cry so agonized, so hopeless, and withal so horribly inhuman, as even now my hair stirs to remember it. To avoid this cursed spot and begone was my involuntary and half-acted purpose, checked, however, on the instant by a blinding flash of lightning that seared my very eyes, while my brain seemed all shattered in by the accompanying peal. Painfully wrought upon as I have ever been by any loudness of sound, it was some moments before I could recover myself, and indeed I was still reeling from the shock, when the door was flung wide and the figure of a man outlandishly clothed, and of a yellowness of skin such as I had never before seen, hurried by me into the midst of the road, where it fell quash in the kennel. The man was dead. It was evident from the mere sight of him, and from the formless clutter of gaudy rags he was; I turned about, and within the gap of the door ere it was shut-to, I saw the delicate, handsome features of my uncle, Botolph Cleeve. How the storm went thereafter I know not, but I know that for a full half-hour I stood wrenching at the door that callous fiend had locked in my face, but could nowise move it. Then, with a thrill of disgust, I went to the dead outcast, where he lay all wet and smirched, and drew from between his shoulders the long thin knife that was stuck there to the haft. This I cleaned and put up in my jerkin. It was my only weapon. The body was of a man stout and of great strength, though not tall, and as well by the cast of his features as by his clothing I knew him for one of them they name Cataians, or Chinese, that perhaps had been led to this inhospitable asylum by rascally allurements of adventurers upon some Eastward voyage; as I had once seen two Indians, that sat huddled on the ground in the Exchange, with a ring of laughing apprentices about them, and of whom I heard it said that they were princes in their own land. But by what marches of fate this poor Chinese had been defeated, and sent down from his home in the East to death in our inexorable London, I could by no means conjecture; nor yet could I determine (which imported me more) what course it were fittest I should herein follow. Howbeit, a certain strange faintness then assailing me, partly from sheer hunger, but more by reason of the horror of this murder, I saw my dilemma settled for that while; and so, staggering forth of the lane into Royal Street, where is a good tavern, I there made shift to eat, but principally drank, until I had rid myself at least of the extremity of distress into which I had fallen.