in order that they might be rendered intelligible, and so, fixing her gaze upon my face, she sobbed out her prayer again and again,
"O suffer me to keep my man and my children. O suffer me to keep my man and my children. O suffer them not to be taken away from me. Allah, Tuan, suffer me to keep my man and my children."
I knew, of course, that she spoke of her "man and her children" nierely from a sense of decorum, since it is coarse and indecent, in the opinion of an up- country woman, to speak of "her husband" without euphonism, even though she be childless; but, for the moment, I supposed that she was the wife of some man accused of a crime, who had come to me seeking the aid that I had not the power to give.
"What has your man done?" I inquired
"Done, Tuan?" she cried. "What could he do, seeing that he is as one already dead? Unless men lifted him he could not move. But suffer him not to be taken from me. He is all that I have, and in truth I cannot live without him. Hang me on high, Tuan, sell me in a far land, burn me till I am con- sumed, duck me till I be drowned, but suffer not my man and my children to be taken from me. I shall die. Tuan, if you allow this thing to befall us.”
Then suddenly the mist obscuring my memory rolled away, and I saw the face of this woman, as I had seen it once before, straining under a terrible burden on the banks of the Jělai River, with the sun- set glow and the dark masses of foliage making a background against which it stood revealed. Then
