But not for two weeks. At the end of that time, he walked into his rooms in Sacramento, and in his old manner took his seat at the faro-table.
“How's your arm, Jack?” asked an incautious player.
There was a smile followed the question, which, however, ceased as Jack looked up quietly at the speaker.
“It bothers my dealing a little; but I can shoot as well with my left.”
The game was continued in that decorous silence which usually distinguished the table at which Mr. John Oakhurst presided.
WAN LEE, THE PAGAN
As I opened Hop Sing's letter, there fluttered to the ground a square strip of yellow paper covered with hieroglyphics, which, at first glance, I innocently took to be the label from a pack of Chinese fire-crackers. But the same envelope also contained a smaller strip of rice-paper, with two Chinese characters traced in India ink, that I at once knew to be Hop Sing's visiting-card. The whole, as afterwards literally translated, ran as follows:—
“To the stranger the gates of my house are not closed: the rice-jar is on the left, and the sweetmeats on the right, as you enter.
Two sayings of the Master:—