A second Imperial Order soon followed the first summoning Hang Ti to the capital, whither he hastily repaired, having first laid his hands on as much of his ill-gotten wealth as he could conveniently carry, hoping thereby to bribe the palace underlings, and so mitigate in some measure the punishment he deserved. On his arrival in Peking he was not permitted to enter his Imperial master’s presence, but was presented by an official with a handsome silk scarf, a polite hint that he might hang himself and so save his person the greater indignity of decapitation. So Hang Ti passes out of the story, and an energetic officer named Yeh Lok reigned in his stead. Yeh subdued the rebels with a firm hand, and in three months the district, although somewhat depopulated, was reported to the “Son of Heaven” as being “Happy, contented, and at peace.” Yeh next turned his attention to the administration of his district, and found that there utter chaos reigned in every department. The prisons were overcrowded to a disgraceful extent, and the majority of the unfortunate prisoners had not even any crime registered against them. Yeh’s heart bled for them: this shocking state of affairs had to be at once remedied. The idea of keeping people in prison for indefinite periods without trial revolted Yeh’s every sense of what was right and just. He ordered them, therefore, to be taken out in batches of forty and to be beheaded. Forty each day till the gaols were empty and cleared of all persons wrongfully incarcerated. -------------- Lok Hing squatted in tattered blue cotton garments behind a tin of pea-nuts at the roadside; an old umbrella afforded him a grateful shade from the blazing sun, and his well-ventilated and roomy clothes allowed of his scratching any portion of himself with the least possible effort. He was a man of no ambition, content to earn a few cash by selling pea-nuts and spend his life in a philosophical melancholy. As he sat tapping the tin with an elongated finger-nail and droning out a mournful eulogy of his wares, To Tao, the hunchback, passed. To Tao by his infirmity was unfitted for heavy manual labour, but his distorted body seemed to be endowed with some marvellous power of rendering natural objects equally grotesque. No one for hundreds of li around could produce small trees in such fantastic shapes and weird eccentricities of growth as he. Hence to all outward appearances almost as poverty stricken as Lok Hing, To Tao was a man of some means, seeing that the wealthy gentry were only too glad to purchase the curious trees and shrubs that resulted from his untiring care and peculiar skill. As To Tao passed, Lok Hing softly sang: “Forty yesterday, forty the day before, in all three hundred and sixty, and now all are finished.” “What does my brother mean?” asked To Tao, whose close attention to the cultivation of his plants had left him ignorant of public affairs.