This was the creature who had helped him into the boat before light, who had touched him. When the junk bumped into the masonry of the city’s front, he tossed a silver dollar into the leper’s dress. She screamed for more as she would have done had the piece been a double-eagle. Fearful lest she should spring at him, the white man threw another coin into her lap and fled. Yet after all, he took Shanghai with something of a smile that day. The first thought was to get clean clothes, but there is always formality and inconvenience about such purchases that are not connected with the barter of rum. Within a few hours he had fallen once more into the great drift; resumed his classic jaunt over Asia and the Islands. It had begun far up a certain big yellow drain many months before. Of the two days which followed, only distorted passages that touched McLean, the money-lender, came to surface. Certain foreigners, however, were stopped upon the streets of Shanghai by a dilapidated American who seemed to have a wild laugh back in his brain, and who inquired with manner, "Has the _John Dividend_ put to sea?" The drift took him at length to the Walled City where a white man may truly be lost, and where countless animals, roughly shaped like men, move about to a dirge-like beat of many afflictions and seem waiting for death. Three days after the white man disappeared into the walled city of Shanghai, a great liner’s nose cleaved the yellow water off Woosung. On the hurricane deck, well away from the enthusiastic party of American tourists, a small slant-eyed man stood alone by the landward rail. To him every puff of the warm breeze was lotus and memory-laden, though he kept his sentiments in chilled steel. "_Dr. Huan Ti Kung, San Francisco to Shanghai,_" was all the ship’s registry told of him.... He might have been twenty or forty, as you preferred. One couldn’t tell anything definite from the styleless black suit and hat he wore, nor from the sombre repose of the classically Chinese face.