“Now what silly upside-down idea is it that you’ve got into that Chinese puzzle you call your head, Kong?” he replied; for this same William was one who habitually gilded unpalatable truths into the semblance of a flattering jest. “Whenever you turn off what you are saying into a willow-pattern compliment and bow seventeen times like an animated mandarin, I know that you are keeping something back. Be a man and a brother, and out with it,” and he struck me heavily upon the left shoulder, which among the barbarians is a proof of cordiality to be esteemed much above the mere wagging of each other’s hands. “In the matter of guidance,” I replied, “this person is ready to sit unreservedly on your well-polished feet. But touching the borrowing of money, obligations to restore with an added sum after a certain period, initial-bearing papers of doubtful import, and the like, I have read too deeply the pointed records of your own printed sheets not to prefer an existence devoted to the scraping together of dust at the street corners, rather than a momentary affluence which in the end would betray me into the tiger-like voracity of a native money-lender.” “Well, you do me proud, Kong,” said William Beveledge, after regarding me fixedly for a moment. “If I didn’t remember that you are a flat-faced, slant-eyed, top-side-under, pig-tailed old heathen, I should be really annoyed at your unwarrantable personalities. Do you take ME for what you call a ‘native money-lender’?” “The pronouncements of destiny are written in iron,” I replied inoffensively, “and it is as truly said that one fated to end his life in a cave cannot live for ever on the top of a pagoda. Undoubtedly as one born and residing here you are native, and as inexorably it succeeds that if you lend me pieces of gold you become a money-lender. Therefore, though honourably inspired at the first, you would equally be drawn into the entanglement of circumstance, and the unevadible end must inevitably be that against which your printed papers consistently warn one.” “And what is that?” asked Beveledge Greyson, still regarding me closely, as though I were a creature of another part.