"Softly he bent over the form of the lovely girl and the beauty of the great room was dwarfed by comparison to the loveliness of Lun Pei Lo."
With the first breath of night Canton becomes a city of mystery, a place of lurking shadows, of soft-cadenced, subdued voices, of lanterns flickering wistfully "out from the folds of darkness, of a thousand varied odors, some revolting, others that seem to possess all the allure and incense of the East.
That evening as I wandered through the narrow alleys that wind through the city like snakes, I noticed a Chinaman standing in the doorway of a tea-house. He was very tall, like a great reed, and he swayed somewhat, which emphasized the simile. He was dressed in a soft black, shapeless suit, unrelieved by any touch of color, a suit which seemed to have been cut from the velvet blackness of the Oriental night. His face was yellow but so pale that it seemed almost white, and his eyes lay in great pits. They glowed with a strange brilliancy like the eyes of a forest animal or of a man who has crossed the threshold of reason. His nose was a monstrosity crushed flat against his face and his lips were so thin they hardly existed. They
