Liu had married meantime. A little daughter had come to his home. Then later his wife died. He left the city and sought employment with his father’s former official friend. The latter gave him a small position as messenger. But official life is precarious. His benefactor lost his position, and Liu was once more down and out. He wandered back to the capital and to his child. * * * * * No one visits Chengtu who does not find his way some time or many times, if he has the opportunity, to the Great East Street at night. By day it is filled with busy buyers at the great silk, tea and porcelain shops, but by night it is more animated still. When the great shops close their shutters at sundown, the curbstones are immediately pre-empted by swarms of junk dealers, curio sellers, vendors of fans, needles, chopsticks, pictures, rare old bronzes, ink slabs and vases. Here, too, are diviners, fortune-tellers and fakirs. It is the bazaar of the capital, once seen not to be forgotten, with its twinkling candles stretching far away, its lines of squatting vendors, its hum of busy voices, its clattering, chattering, crowding thousands who throng the thoroughfare. There with his little store of stuff about him, Liu might be found each night. The day he spent picking up a few curios from house to house, when not too busy with his pipe. One day he rambled again along the street where in former days he, with the rabble, had wrought such ruin to the cause of missions. The church, a new and larger one since those days, stood open. Numbers of people were crowding in, so he, with an uncle and two friends, sons of his former official patron, joined the stream. They listened half curiously, half carelessly, to the prayers and singing, all so strange to them. Something in the sermon, however, brought Liu to attention. The speaker said that this God of love could so fill and thrill a man with His Spirit that even the passion for opium could no longer hold him. Could it be possible? Liu was no willing victim to the habit. He had tried all kinds of pills and strange concoctions guaranteed to cure, or recommended by friends. He had fought by his own will power till that became so weak he scarce struggled longer. But here was a new thought from the truth-telling foreigner, and a new hope. Perhaps this foreign God could help. So at invitation he, with his companions, waited for the after meeting, where all are welcomed who have questions or seek further light. He became even more interested and came again and again, bringing his friends with him. Then the ancestral tablet fell down in the official home one night. The two sons took it as a sign that their ancestors were angry with their worship of the foreign God, so they came no more. A month later a storm burst over the city. The thunder, a somewhat rare thing on the Chengtu plain, so frightened the uncle that he, too, never returned to the church.