“There are bits of some sort of a diary here, Captain O’Shea, and odds and ends that only a native could make head or tail of. I looked them over early this morning, and one of my Chinese did what he could to help. It is impossible to arrange the fragments in any sequence, but the story you tell me dovetails rather curiously with some of the sentences.” “There was many queer things stowed away in that noddle of his,” said O’Shea, “and he was an educated man, so he would be apt to make notes of them. And does he make any mention at all of this Jim Eldridge, alias Bill Maguire?” Inspector Burke carefully smoothed a torn sheet of paper and laid a finger on a few lines scrawled in a shaky hand. They held no reference to the sailor, but several phrases were startlingly familiar to Captain O’Shea. The mutilated passage ran thus: _Very horrid dreams last night--brandy failed to drive them away. Was in a steamer on the Stinking River--the Painted Joss came through the cabin port-hole, squeezing itself small as if made of rubber, and then expanding to gigantic size. It strangled me slowly, making hideous faces. This is a warning--When I dream of the Painted Joss, I am on the edge of seeing things while awake. The fear of violent death is...._ Captain O’Shea was vividly reminded of the disjointed monologue of Bill Maguire, who had shown symptoms of a similar antipathy to the “Painted Joss.” “McDougal wrote down the Stinking River as if it was a real name,” he said to Inspector Burke. “I thought Maguire called it that because it smelled bad. If it is on the map, can ye locate it, and is there by any chance a town with the title of Wang-Li-Fu on the banks of the same?” Inspector Burke summoned a fat, drowsy-looking interpreter and put several questions to him. After poring over an atlas for some time, this owlish Chinese gentleman vouchsafed the information that a navigable stream known as the River of Ten Thousand Evil Smells did indeed flow through a coastwise part of Kiangsu province, emptying into the wide estuary of the old mouth of the Yellow River. There was a city in that region which had been great and flourishing until the Tai-Ping Rebellion laid it in ruins. It was now no more than a wretched hamlet, although in local usage it had retained the name of Wang-Li-Fu, the last syllable of which signified a chief city of a province. “I say, this is interesting,” exclaimed Inspector Burke. “I am inclined to think that you and I have picked up a warm scent, Captain O’Shea. And here’s another bit of paper we can manage to read.” They pored over a muddy page of McDougal’s diary and discovered, alas! that it was no more than a fragment of a little Chinese farce called “The Mender of Broken China-ware.” McDougal had picked it up from some troupe of strolling players and jotted down a rough translation of his own, beginning: