“About what?” demanded a slipper boat-girl with bated breath.
“Who knows, Alinn, when the dreamer does not!”
One late afternoon as the sun hung red in the purple mist, which rises from the rice fields beyond Honam, the Breton was dreaming as usual on the bund’s edge when a sampan gondoliered by a boat-girl glided to a landing stair not far from him. Under the bamboo awning sat a foreigner talking eagerly to her as she moved easily and gracefully her ponderous oar. The boat passed under the bund. Presently the foreigner mounted the landing stage, but at the top of the stairs stopped perplexed and uncertain, then pattered hastily over to the edge.
“Hi! Cumsha! Hi!” he cried, frantically shaking his umbrella at the slipper boat as it started on its way across the river.
The boat trembled momentarily in the dark mighty currents, then turned slowly around and approached that part of the bund where the stranger stood beside the Breton.
“I know you,” he commented, as he glanced quickly up at the Breton, “but look at that,” and he pointed to the girl as she moved with so much grace her slender craft. “A water nymph, sir, in blue pantlets! I am the Reverend Tobias Hook, and I tell you, my young friend, there is not another like her from Wampoa to Wu-Chau; she is a vision of triple dimples, and when you see them you will ooze with envy. What an ideal for a convert! How admirable she will be around the house! I have cumsha for you, my little lost lamb,” he chirped as the girl steadied her boat in the currents below them.
“Throw it down,” she answered in a matter-of-fact way.
“My poor lamb, will you not answer?”
“What?”
“What I spiritually beseeched of you in the boat.”