Short Stories
in four figures and a credit that was gilt edged. An even half-
century of summers and winters had passed over his head,
and, in the passing, fattened him comfortably and snugly.
Short of stature, his full front was as rotund as a water-melon
seed. His face was moon- faced. His garb was dignified and
silken, and his black-silk skull-cap with the red button atop,
now, alas! fallen on the ground, was the skull-cap worn by the
successful and dignified merchants of his race.
But his appearance, in this moment of the present, was an-
ything but dignified. Dodging and ducking under a rain of
blows from a bamboo cane, he was crouched over in a half-
doubled posture. When he was rapped on the knuckles and el-
bows, with which he shielded his face and head, his winces
were genuine and involuntary. From the many surrounding
windows the neighbourhood looked down with placid enjoy-
ment.
And she who wielded the stick so shrewdly from long prac-
tice! Seventy-four years old, she looked every minute of her
time. Her thin legs were encased in straight-lined pants of linen
stiff- textured and shiny-black. Her scraggly grey hair was
drawn unrelentingly and flatly back from a narrow, unrelenting
forehead. Eyebrows she had none, having long since shed them.
Her eyes, of pin-hole tininess, were blackest black. She was
shockingly cadaverous. Her shrivelled forearm, exposed by the
loose sleeve, possessed no more of muscle than several taut bow-
strings stretched across meagre bone under yellow, parchment-
like skin. Along this mummy arm jade bracelets shot up and
down and clashed with every blow.
"Ah!" she cried out, rhythmically accenting her blows in se-
ries of three to each shrill observation. "I forbade you to talk to
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