THE PIED PIPER A gray smudge trailing northward showed where the Fa-Hien--Scottish Oriental, sixteen hundred tons--was disappearing from the pale expanse of ocean.

The sampan drifted landward imperceptibly, seeming, with nut-brown sail unstirred, to remain where the impatient steamer had met it, dropped a solitary passenger overside, and cast him loose upon the breadth of the antipodes.

Rare and far, the sails of junks patched the horizon with umber polygons.

Rudolph, sitting among his boxes in the sampan, viewed by turns this desolate void astern and the more desolate sweep of coast ahead.

His matting sail divided the shining bronze outpour of an invisible river, divided a low brown shore beyond, and above these, the strips of some higher desert country that shone like snowdrifts, or like sifted ashes from which the hills rose black and charred.