Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/limehousenights00burkiala LIMEHOUSE NIGHTS by THOMAS BURKE [Illustration] New York Robert M. McBride & Company 1919 Copyright by Robert M. McBride & Co. Second Printing September, 1917 Third Printing October, 1917 Fourth Printing November, 1917 Fifth Printing March, 1918 Sixth Printing September, 1918 Seventh Printing March, 1919 Eighth Printing July, 1919 Ninth Printing September, 1919 Tenth Printing October, 1919 Published August, 1917 _To Caradoc Evans_ _Limehouse Nights_ _Contents_ _Page_ _The Chink and the Child_ 13 _The Father of Yoto_ 39 _Gracie Goodnight_ 57 _The Paw_ 75 _The Cue_ 97 _Beryl, the Croucher and the Rest of England_ 111 _The Sign of the Lamp_ 133 _Tai Fu and Pansy Greers_ 149 _The Bird_ 169 _Gina of the Chinatown_ 187 _The Knight-Errant_ 231 _The Gorilla and the Girl_ 255 _Ding-Dong-Dell_ 273 _Old Joe_ 291 _The Chink and the Child_ It is a tale of love and lovers that they tell in the low-lit Causeway that slinks from West India Dock Road to the dark waste of waters beyond. In Pennyfields, too, you may hear it; and I do not doubt that it is told in far-away Tai-Ping, in Singapore, in Tokio, in Shanghai, and those other gay-lamped haunts of wonder whither the wandering people of Limehouse go and whence they return so casually. It is a tale for tears, and should you hear it in the lilied tongue of the yellow men, it would awaken in you all your pity. In our bald speech it must, unhappily, lose its essential fragrance, that quality that will lift an affair of squalor into the loftier spheres of passion and imagination, beauty and sorrow. It will sound unconvincing, a little ... you know ... the kind of thing that is best forgotten. Perhaps.... But listen.