Finally they came to a corner without having been challenged or molested, and on a side street was a brilliantly lighted restaurant wide open to the highway and crowded with half naked soldiery. The Duke and the old Taoist paused irresolute. And while stared a tall figure came up from behind them, made directly for the open eating house and walked boldly in. They saw by the light tha it was a foreigner, a big ligh€ haired man in cotton shirt and tiding breeches.
"Ai!" exclaimed Duke, the "they fear nothing."
There had been a great hubbub and rattling of chinaware up to this moment in the eating house. A hundred men were talking at once and plying their chopsticks ind drinking vessels as they talked. Absolute silence followed the forzigner's entry, silence so absolute that there was something amusing about it, and the Duke turned to tis old companion and grinned. Their curiosity overwhelmed them—that Chinese curiosity which drives the timid man irresistibly into situations where no bribe sould take him—and they stood in the doorway, ignored by all the secupants of the restaurant, and focused their astonished eyes on the yellow head of the tall foreigner *xhom the assembled company like vise regarded with open mouths, bulging eyes and poised cups and chopsticks. The cook behind his kettles stood with the sweat dripping from his nose and chin and vith both hands in the air, one holding a dirty rag and the other a dripping ladle. They stood or sat as their surprise had overtaken them, like a company turned to stone—for an instant and for an instant only, but in that instant the foreigner had made a place for himself on a bench beside two soldiers and facing three others, and nonchalantly signalled a petrified servant that he wanted service. Then he turned to the men at his table with an affable smile and spoke in Chinese easily and fiuently, and in a tone that carried throughout the restaurant.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.