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Show stealthy way down the narrow, back city lane to gratify lust? It would mean constant reproach. How the neighbors would, to his face, condole with the family over their dead-weight. The old lady in America, the gracious land of plenty, said, "Blessed sickness, sick and eat." The Chinese family in the tight pinch of poverty, with their own stomachs seldom really full, regard with deep dismay the "eating corpse" (the man who consumes but never produces). Said a poor man, "My father was ill a long, long time,'' and, mournfully-' < he never ate a bit the less!'' It would mean to be lonely, as lonely as a faraway lighthouse keeper, with oil spent, sitting solitary in his midnight. It would mean monotony, long, dull, unending dreary days, rainy days, cold, cloudy days (how the opium taker dreads such!). No more flitting about and forgetting one's own misery in the eager bustle and news of the city streets. It would mean unending dark. To the heathen there is no watchful, tender providence, no Father with out-stretched arms, no Comforter. When the cold, blue, far-away, unpitying "Heaven" shuts the door of his cage, that is the end of struggle, and the knell of hope. "Ming yeh!" he moans, ("My destiny!"), and the spirit dies out of him. Besides his old mother, Mr. Tong had a young and pretty wife. They had no children. Perhaps the Judge of all the earth remembered the sins of his youth. The dull agony of his possible future gnawed at his heart strings like a cancer. "Why don't you go to Pang Chuang (14 miles away) and get your eyes treated?" said a friend. The devil sat up and listened. How he hated 5 |