“Splendid, uncle.”
“And we’ll forgive him—eh?”
“Certainly, uncle.”
Five minutes later the object of these remarks appeared, to say that a party of gentlemen had arrived.
It was a deputation from the foreign merchants of the port, to offer condolences and help to their brethren; and on finding how little the Lynns had suffered, they did not hesitate to tell them that they might have expected the fate that befell them, which was like a judgment upon them for erecting their warehouse and stores so far away from their brother-merchants, and prophesied more evil to them if they failed now to remove to a safer position.
“Likely!” said Uncle Jeff. “Who’s going to pull a great place like this down and build another?”
This after their friends had gone.
“It is impossible, of course, Jeff,” said Stan’s father sadly. “We must content ourselves with strengthening this a little more, and hope to escape by being more ready for an attack.”
By this time clerks and warehousemen—the latter Chinese—were busy at work over their daily avocations, just as if nothing had happened, though the remarks among themselves were many. The native craftsmen, too—carpenters, painters, and glaziers—were busy repairing damages, just as if, Stan thought, it was a town in old England, instead of in the far east of Asia, when a Chinese messenger arrived, a round-faced, carefully dressed, middle-aged man, who had come in charge of a consignment of silk from the collecting hong of Lynn Brothers’ house down south on the Mour River; and one of the passages in the letter the man brought from their manager was the cause of a good deal of perplexity at such a time.
Stan entered the room after a quiet inspection of the messenger, who smiled at him blandly and then began to carefully trim and polish the nails of his forefingers, each of which was long and sharp and kept in a thimble-like sheath of silver; while, to indicate his higher position in life than the cook, the new arrival’s dark-blue frock was of silk.