Short Stories
"Ah! Stubborn one! Why do you not cry? Mule that
shameth its ancestors! Never have I made you cry. From the
time you were a little boy I have never made you cry. Answer
me! Why do you not cry?"
Weak and breathless from her exertions, she dropped the
stick and panted and shook as if with a nervous palsy.
"I do not know, except that it is my way," Ah Kim replied,
gazing solicitously at his mother. "I shall bring you a chair
now, and you will sit down and rest and feel better."
But she flung away from him with a snort and tottered ag-
edly across the garden into the house. Meanwhile recovering
his skull-cap and smoothing his disordered attire, Ah Kim
rubbed his hurts and gazed after her with eyes of devotion. He
even smiled, and almost might it appear that he had enjoyed
the beating.
Ah Kim had been so beaten ever since he was a boy, when he
lived on the high banks of the eleventh cataract of the Yangtse
river. Here his father had been born and toiled all his days from
young manhood as a towing coolie. When he died, Ah Kim, in
his own young manhood, took up the same honourable profes-
sion. Farther back than all remembered annals of the family, had
the males of it been towing coolies. At the time of Christ his di-
rect ancestors had been doing the same thing, meeting the pre-
cisely similarly modelled junks below the white water at the foot
of the canyon, bending the half-mile of rope to each junk, and,
according to size, tailing on from a hundred to two hundred
coolies of them and by sheer, two- legged man-power, bowed
forward and down till their hands touched the ground and their
faces were sometimes within a foot of it, dragging the junk up
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