Short Stories
at the bottom for fifteen gold per month. He worked a year
and a half, and resigned when he was thirty-three, despite the
seventy-five gold per month his Chinese employers were pay-
ing him. Then it was that he put up his own sign: AH KIM
COMPANY, GENERAL MERCHANDISE. Also, better fed,
there was about his less meagre figure a foreshadowing of the
melon-seed rotundity that was to attach to him in future years.
With the years he prospered increasingly, so that, when he
was thirty-six, the promise of his figure was fulfilling rapidly,
and, himself a member of the exclusive and powerful Hai
Gum Tong, and of the Chinese Merchants' Association, he was
accustomed to sitting as host at dinners that cost him as much
as thirty years of towing on the eleventh cataract would have
earned him. Two things he missed: a wife, and his mother to
lay the stick on him as of yore.
When he was thirty-seven he consulted his bank balance. It
stood him three thousand gold. For twenty-five hundred down
and an easy mortgage he could buy the three-story shack-
building, and the ground in fee simple on which it stood. But to
do this, left only five hundred for a wife. Fu Yee Po had a mar-
riageable, properly small-footed daughter whom he was willing
to import from China, and sell to him for eight hundred gold,
plus the costs of importation. Further, Fu Yee Po was even will-
ing to take five hundred down and the remainder on note at 6
per cent.
Ah Kim, thirty-seven years of age, fat and a bachelor, really
did want a wife, especially a small-footed wife; for, China born
and reared, the immemorial small-footed female had been deep-
ly impressed into his fantasy of woman. But more, even more
and far more than a small-footed wife, did he want his mother
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