After dinner they met as agreed, and "the Mystery" seated himself comfortably for the story he was about to tell. "The coolie-trade," said he, "does not exist any more. It was very much like the slave-trade, of which you have read; in fact, it was nothing more than the slave-trade with the form changed a little. In the African slave-trade the slaves were bought as one might buy sheep and cattle. In the coolie-traffic the men were hired for a term of years at certain stipulated wages, and were to be returned to their homes at the end of that term, provided all their debts had been discharged. The plan was all right on its face, but it was not carried out. When the period for which he was engaged was up, the coolie was always made to be in debt to his employer; and, no matter how hard he might work, he was not allowed to free himself. He was a slave to his master just as much as was the negro from Africa, and not one coolie in a thousand ever saw his native land again. [Illustration: BARRACOONS AT MACAO.] "Not only were the men hired on contracts that they could never cancel, but they were stolen, just as slaves are stolen in Africa. Boats were sent up the rivers in the southern part of China to bring back loads of coolies. They would land an armed party at a village, seize all the men in the place, and bring them to the port, where they would be transferred to the dealers, who would send them to the places where their labor was needed. Macao was the great port for the coolie trade, and the Portuguese had large sheds there, which they called _barracoons_, for holding the coolies in prison till they were ready to ship them away. These barracoons were sometimes so crowded that thousands of coolies died there in the course of a single year. The natives called them '_chu-tze-kuan_,' or 'pig-pens,' and they were so filthy that they richly deserved the name. "The name 'coolie' belongs properly to a tribe of natives on the northern coast of Africa, but it is applied to a laborer of any part of the East, and this is its meaning in Japan and China. [Illustration: COOLIES EMBARKING AT MACAO.] "The laborers who were to be taken to Cuba or Peru were received on board the ships, and counted as they came over the side, like so many boxes or bales of merchandise; in fact, they were nothing but merchandise, and the receipts were made out for a certain number of coolies without the least record of their names and residences. I was once in a ship that took a cargo of these people to Peru, and I don't believe that anybody on board felt otherwise than if he had been in the slave-trade. And we had a narrow escape from having our throats cut by our cargo and our bodies thrown into the sea." "Please tell us about that," said Fred. Frank echoed the request, and their informer nodded his consent.