Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1919 edition. Excerpt: ... After His Kind In after years, when Bill Devoy, detective of Second Branch and on the Pell Street beat of sewer gas and opium and yellow men and white, had retired from service, he used to remark that of all them damned Chinks the only one who had ever really got his goat and got it a-plenty and for keeps, was that there stinkm' lemon-coloured old hypocrite of a Yu Ch'ang, the joss-house priest. Then he would cock his feet on the veranda railing of the little semi-detached Long Island villa where he was living on his pension and whatever "sugar" he had accumulated during his years on the police force, look out over the surrounding scenery which included a neat spider's web of railway metal, a neighbour's underwear swinging in the breeze with that pompous and selfrighteous dignity peculiar to wet, red flannel, and a mysterious nest of battered tomato cans, spit reflectively at a mosquito, and say, quite without rancour: "I dunno, though. Perhaps that pouchbellied old hop head of a Chink was as innercent as the jury of twelve gents good and true sed he was. Ye never can tell, can ye, with the likes of them--chiefly considerin' that Miss Rutter" He would pause, and continue, musingly: "I dunno about that, either. Ye see--the very women down there in Pell Street ye wouldn't believe it of . . . well--never mind" Quite without rancour, too, was Yu Ch'ang who just about the same time, having left Pell Street and returned to his native Canton, was remarking to abbot Shen Chin, keeper of the temple of the Five Rams, that foreign devils were decidedly odd people! "They either ask too many questions, or not enough. But then--" sliding his fan from the voluminous sleeve and slowly clicking apart the fretted, silk-covered ivory sticks--"is sense a...