The result of my folly was a mild case of dysentery....

In a few days I was so weak that I went around as if I had no bones left in my body.  And I wanted to leave the country.  And I repaired to Captain ——­ who had given me the job, and asked him for my pay and my discharge.  He lit into me, disgusted, upbraiding me for a worthless tramp....

“I might have known that you were of that ilk, from the first, just by looking at you!”

He handed me the eighty dollars in Mexican silver, that was coming to me....  I repaid the captain the forty I had borrowed, for food.

“Sick! yes, sick of laziness!”

Captain ——­ was partly right.  I had an uncontrollable distaste for the monotony of daily work, repeated in the same environment, surrounded by the same scenery ... but I was also quite weak and sick, and I am persuaded, that, if I had stayed on there, I might have died.

* * * * *

I sat on one of the wharves and played host to a crowd of romantic thoughts that moved in their pageant through my brain ... now I would go on to Pekin and see the great Forbidden City.  Now I would dress in Chinese clothes and beg my way through the very heart of the Chinese Empire ... and write a book, subsequently, about my experiences and adventures ... and perhaps win a medal of some famous society for it ... and I had a dream of marrying some quaintly beautiful mandarin’s daughter, of becoming a famous, revered Chinese scholar, bringing together with my influence the East and the West....

I reached so far, in the dream, as to buy several novels of the Chinese, printed in their characters, of an itinerant vendor....

The everyday world swung into my ken again.

Three junks, laden with American marines, dropping down the river from
Pekin, cut across my abstracted gaze ... the boys were singing.

They marched off on the dock on which I sat.  They were stationed right where they deployed from the junks.  Men were put in guard over them.

At Tien Tsin they had behaved rather badly, I was told by one of them,—­had gone on a Samshu jag ... a Chinese drink, worse than the worst American “rot-gut.” ...

“Wisht I c’d git off the dock an’ rustle up another drink somewheres.”

“They wouldn’t let us off this dock fer love nor money,” spoke up a lithe, blue-shaven marine to me—­the company’s barber, I afterward learned him to be....

“Yah, we got ter stay here all afternoon, an’ me t’roat’s es dry es san’paper.”

“Where are they taking you to, from here?”

“Manila!... the Indiana’s waitin’ out in th’ bay fer us.”

“—­Wish I could get off with you!” I remarked.

“Wot’s the matter?  On th’ bum here?”

“Yes.”

Immediately the barber and two others, his pals, became intensely, suspiciously so, interested in my desire to sail with them....