place. It blazed a symbol of good health. Yen Yun laughed delighted.
"it is a beautiful gift" she ac-Knowledged gratefully. Chen, hold-Ing the paper between her face and the flame in the stove, observed the resulting rosy glow and swelled with pride at the wisdom of his selection.
"Look, Yen Yun, look at the money T earned to-day." ' He strutted to the table and amplied his purse. "Now your people must admit I am able support a wife."
Yen Yun took it all into her thrifty hands." Slowly dhe pushed few coppers into a pile by themselves. "Let us go to the compradore and buy, a small bit of er," she suggested. with the n Together they descended the ladder and soon found themselves inside a dimslighted shop. Yen Yun's nose ed her directly to the Ash counter and Chen stood awkwardly behind. He was not so good in selecting the best and this he felt. His hour of the day was when he emptied his earning with a flourish upon the table. "Although he pretended never {fo notice, he was always filled with Fride at' the way Yen Yun out smarted the ish dealer. Tt was at the moment the fish Loy upon the scales that two people entered the mop with a blast of noisiness. They carried between them q basket half-filled with oranges. The man, Chen observed, looked as though he had just fought ten man-eating tigers vareshanded and killed them. Such swaggering!
'The face under a hat port with red bows suddenly spied Chen. "There he is, Juan, that orange peddler. "Tt was all' on account of his oranges..."
Herel buy yourself some tish," was the peremptory command that Accompanied the thrust of a $1 bill into Chen's hand. about?" asked the astonished Yen Yun. She had cap fumed the money; it had vanished Into a hidden pocket.
Chen's voice rippled into a chuckle. "1 do not know. But this I do know—she, said my oranges were for her pape," he laughed merrily, "That man wes never her papal"
With the advice of friends, however, he was able to carry on from Liking to Tolifu, Hsiakuan and to the capital. Here the financial situa tion was not greatly improved. The CP.O, airways, railways and bus companies demanded government notes and apparently toa certain extent these were current every. where, bringing a certain amount of local currency here and a different amount there. Paper money was the order of the day and toa stranger from Szechuen, not over-worried on the question "of finance. Yunnan money market demanded not only caution but vigilance. When one Central Bank note purchased teu Yunnan dollars the purchaser jumped to the conclusion that the Yunnan dollars would go a long way.
This, however, was quite a mistake us Holder one day walked into the American Consulate with over 300 Yunnan paper dollars and all he got was one innocent-looking passport which in no way made him immune from being cleaned out by robbers only a few days from the capital, Roughly the situation Is something Uke this: 10 gold dollars bring over 30 dollars Mex. and over 30 dollars Mex. bring over 30 Yunnan paper dollars, Actually the American passport which carried with it immunity {rom nothing, either inside or outside Yunnan, "Was worth something like US$10, but Ils value, however, in local currency was over $300 and to simple-minded Texan this looked appalling. Bigger and heavier financial losses were still ahead.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.