Throughout the final two hours of the passage between Nagasaki and the Shanghai port, Dr. Ti Kung did not once leave the liner’s deck. The ship was now churning the yellow emptyings of the Yang-tze, and that which held his eyes ahead, looked very much like a swamp to the eyes of the Americans and English. To Dr. Ti Kung it was not marshland, but the garment’s hem of the Mother Empire, not seen these many years. There were no tears in his eyes; it is doubtful if his pulse had quickened. It is dangerous to suggest the nature of a yellow man’s emotion. None but a yellow man could understand exactly. Yet this was certain, Dr. Ti Kung had not stood on the deck heretofore during the three weeks’ voyage from San Francisco. He had not gone ashore in Japanese ports. The expression on his face was as serene and contemplative as usual while the liner lay on the different days in the three harbours of Nippon. But the face of the yellow man is not an authoritative document. The recent ten years in America had been years of much movement, study and mystery. He had lived much in college towns, in Toronto, Vancouver, also in California and New England. It had not been the mere matter of an education, though he had specialised rather extensively at chemistry and biology. Plentiful education is to be had in Peking. Dr. Ti Kung had made friends in America. There were Americans of his own age who had tried to know him as a white man knows another. It may be certain of these believed they succeeded. The Chinese accepted with equal mind the condescension of his inferiors, who held the belief that the Celestial Empire was a kind of giant laundry, and the frank, emotional friendliness of those of his classmates and business affiliates who had found that he was equally prodigious as athlete and student. His was a manner of profound gentility, with a mental background sumptuous in colour and experience. To Dr. Ti Kung most of these Americans were acquaintances, nothing more. The word _friend_ in his language was something to which only the best aspired. In spite of his various appearances for a year or more in different colleges and commercial establishments, none of these affairs had made up the real life of Dr. Ti Kung, nor had anything to do with his present journey home. He had not worked for money. A certain class of American acquaintances had found him not only approachable for temporary benefit but admirable in forgetfulness as he was unswerving in bestowal. His material means seemed inexhaustible from the first. A large portion of his life in America was unaccounted for, except by the few men and women whose lips were as well governed as his own.