Short Stories
Ah Chun knocked the ashes out of his pipe, thoughtfully re-
filling the silver bowl with a tiny pleget of tobacco. He lighted it
and smoked it out before he spoke.
"Henrietta is the oldest girl. The day she marries I will give
her three hundred thousand dollars. That will fetch that Captain
Higginson and his high family along with him. Let the word go
out to him. I leave it to you."
And Ah Chun sat and smoked on, and in the curling smoke-
wreaths he saw take shape the face and figure of Toy Shuey—
Toy Shuey, the maid of all work in his uncle's house in the Can-
tonese village, whose work was never done and who received
for a whole year's work one dollar. And he saw his youthful self
arise in the curling smoke, his youthful self who had toiled
eighteen years in his uncle's field for little more. And now he, Ah
Chun, the peasant, dowered his daughter with three hundred
thousand years of such toil. And she was but one daughter of a
dozen. He was not elated at the thought. It struck him that it was
a funny, whimsical world, and he chuckled aloud and startled
Mamma Achun from a revery which he knew lay deep in the
hidden crypts of her being where he had never penetrated.
But Ah Chun's word went forth, as a whisper, and Captain
Higginson forgot his rear-admiralship and his high family and
took to wife three hundred thousand dollars and a refined and
cultured girl who was one thirty-second Polynesian, one-
sixteenth Italian, one- sixteenth Portuguese, eleven thirty-
seconds English and Yankee, and one-half Chinese.
Ah Chun's munificence had its effect. His daughters became
suddenly eligible and desirable. Clara was the next, but when
the Secretary of the Territory formally proposed for her, Ah
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