What we in extremity have eaten!--Leavings of dog's flesh, putrid and unsaleable, flung to us by the mocking butchers; _minari_, a water-cress gathered from stagnant pools of slime; spoiled _kimchi_ that would revolt the stomachs of peasants and that could be smelled a mile.
Ay--I have stolen bones from curs, gleaned the public road for stray grains of rice, robbed ponies of their steaming bean-soup on frosty nights.
It is not strange that I did not die.

I knew and was upheld by two things: the first, the Lady Om by my side; the second, the certain faith that the time would come when my thumbs and fingers would fast-lock in the gullet of Chong Mong-ju.
Turned always away at the city gates of Keijo, where I sought Chong Mong- ju, we wandered on, through seasons and decades of seasons, across Cho- Sen, whose every inch of road was an old story to our sandals.

Our history and identity were wide-scattered as the land was wide.

No person breathed who did not know us and our punishment.

There were coolies and peddlers who shouted insults at the Lady Om and who felt the wrath of my clutch in their topknots, the wrath of my knuckles in their faces.