It was mail-day, and gayety flowed among the tables, under the thin acacias, on a high tide of Amer Picon.
Through the inky files of the coaling-coolies burst an alien and bewildered figure.

He passed unnoticed, except by the filthy little Arab bootblacks who swarmed about him, trotting, capering, yelping cheerfully: "Mista Ferguson!--polish, finish!--can-can--see nice Frencha girl--Mista McKenzie, Scotcha fella from Dublin--smotta picture--polish, finish!"-- undertoned by a squabbling chorus.

But presently, studying his face, they cried in a loud voice, "Nix! Alles!" and left him, as one not desiring polish.
"German, that chap," drawled the captain of the Tsuen-Chau, lazily, noticing the uncertain military walk of the young man's clumsy legs, his uncouth clothes, his pale visage winged by blushing ears of coral pink.
"The Eitel's in, then," replied Cesare.

And they let the young Teuton vanish in the vision of mixed lives.
Down the lane of music and chatter and drink he passed slowly, like a man just wakened,--assailed by Oriental noise and smells, jostled by the races of all latitudes and longitudes, surrounded and solitary, unheeded and self-conscious.

With a villager's awkwardness among crowds, he made his way to a German shipping-office.
"Dispatches for Rudolph Hackh ?" he inquired, twisting up his blond moustache, and trying to look insolent and peremptory, like an employer of men.
"There are none, sir," answered an amiable clerk, not at all impressed.
Abashed once more in the polyglot street, still daunted by his first plunge into the foreign and the strange, he retraced his path, threading shyly toward the Quai Francois Joseph.