“I wonder,” said the boy, “if that's why I used to hate it so when my tutor dragged me through the Metropolitan Museum?”
“Doubtless.”
“And this picture has a great value, I suppose?”
“It is virtually priceless—in East as well as West,” replied Doane as he replaced it among its fellows in the box.
Thus began, late but perhaps not too late, what may be regarded as the education of young Rockingham Kane.
CHAPTER XII—AT THE HOUR OF THE TIGER
THEY passed, that evening, the region of Peng-tze where Tao Yuan-ming, after a scant three months as district magistrate, surrendered his honors and retired to his humble farm near Kiu Kiang, there to write in peace the verse and prose that have endured during sixteen crowded centuries; and on, then, moving slowly through the precipitous Gateway of Anking and, later, around the bend that bounds that city on the west, south and east. Those on deck could see, indistinctly in the deepening twilight, the vast area of houses and ruins—for Anking had not yet recovered from the devastations of the T'ai-ping rebels in the eighteen-sixties—where half a million yellow folk swarm like ants; and very indistinctly indeed, farther to the north, they could see: the blue mountains. Slowly, quietly, then, Anking, with its ruins and its memories fell away astern.
Half an hour later the sweeps were lashed along the rail. The great dark sails, with their scalloped edges between the battens of bamboo, seeming more than ever, in the dusk, like the wings of an enormous bat, were lowered; and with many shouts and rhythmic cries the tracking ropes were run out to mooring poles on the bank. Forward the mattings were adjusted for the night. The smells of tobacco and frying fish drifted aft. A youth, sipping tea by the rail, put down his cup and sang softly in falsetto a long narrative of friendship and the mighty river and (incidentally) the love of a maiden who slipped away from her mother's side at night to meet a handsome student only to be slain, as was just, by the hand of an elder brother.... From the cabin aft drifted a faint odor of incense. A flageolet mingled its plaintive oboe-like note with the song of the youth by the rail.... From a near-by village came soft evening sounds, and the occasional barking of dogs, and the beat of a watchman's gong.... The greatest of rivers—greatest in traffic and in rich memories of the endless human drama—was settling quietly for the night.