He had been growing feebler so long and so gradually that I had made nothing of it. Once, I remember, it struck me queer that he wasn't working so hard as he had used to. Still earliest of all and latest of all, he would sometimes leave his iron cooling on the board now and stand for minutes of the precious day, dreaming out of the harbor window. When the sun was sinking, the shaft through the window bathed his head and his lean neck with a quality almost barbaric, and for a moment in the gloom made by the bright pencil, the new, raw things of Urkey faded out, leaving him alone in his ancient and ordered civilization, a little wistful, I think, and perhaps a little frightened, as a child waking from a long, dreaming sleep, to find his mother gone. He had begun to talk about China, too, and the river where he was born. And I made nothing of it, it came on so gradually, day by day. Then I went away, as I have said, and came back again. I dropped in at the scow the second day after the packet brought me home. "Hello, there!" I cried, peeping over the counter, "I got a collar for you to--to--" I began to stumble. "Mr. Yen Sin, dear me, what's the matter of you?" "Mista Yen Sin fine," he said in a strengthless voice, smiling and nodding from the couch where he lay, half propped up by a gorgeous, faded cushion. "Mista Yen Sin go back China way pletty quick now, yes." "Honest?" He made no further answer, but took up the collar I had brought. "You been gone Gillypo't, yes? You take colla China boy, yes?" "Yessir!" "He pletty nice man, Sam Low, yes?" "Oh, you know him, then? Oh, he's all right, Yen Sin." It was growing dark outside, and colder, with a rising wind from landward to seaward against the tide. A sense of something odd and wrong came over me; it was a moment before I could make it out. The fire was dead in the stove for the first time in memory and the Vestal irons were cold. Yen Sin asked me to light the lamp. In the waxing yellow glow he turned his eyes to mine, and mine were big. "You know Mista God?" he questioned. "Oh, yes," I answered soberly. "Yes, indeed." "Mista God allee same like Mista Yen Sin, yes?" I felt myself paling at his blasphemy, and thought of lightning. "Mista God," he went on in the same speculative tone, "Mista God know allee bad things, allee same like Mista Yen Sin, yes?" "Where is the minister?" I demanded in desperation. "Mista Yen Sin likee see Mista Minista." When he added, with a transparent hand fluttering over his heart: "Like see pletty quick now," I seemed to fathom for the first time what was happening to him. "Wait," I cried, too full of awe to know what I said. "Wait, wait, Yen Sin. I'll fetch 'im." It was dark outside, the sky overcast, and the wind beginning to moan a high note across the roofs as it swept in from the moors and out again over the graying waters. In the shore street my eyes chanced upon the light of Center Church, and I remembered that it was meeting-night. * * *