The Vermilion Pencil: A Romance of China

In the southern suburbs, almost under the shadow of the city walls and midway between the Dragon Gate on the right and the Great Bamboo Gate on the left, once stood a Lodge of t...

I. THE WANDERER 185 II. WORD FROM THE UNKNOWN 198 III. DAWN AGAIN 205 IV. THE GROTTO OF THE SLEEPLESS DRAGON 211 V. THE PROPITIATION OF THE GODS OF THE WATERS 218 VI. The Propit...

Among the festivals of Southern China none is more popular than the Propitiation of the Gods of the Waters, which takes place during the spring and autumn in villages and cities...

Early upon the day of the execution four French gunboats and a cruiser got up steam and moved slowly down the river toward the bund. The cruiser anchored opposite the place of e...

The Bay of Tai Wan, where the Breton had been for more than a month and upon whose shore he had buried the derelict, is a long distance down the coast southeast of Yingching, an...

In the phenomena of national life there are certain conditions that force men into such a labyrinthine existence that they resemble, in their bore and burrow, the teredo. These...

A month after the night-flight and night-riot, which the Propitiation of the Gods of the Waters had brought about, a defensive calm pervaded the Mission of Yingching and its imm...

While the penal laws of China are the old codes of the ancient world, their antiquity is not significant of their decay, and though some of them were in force on those days when...

After passing under the waterfall curtaining the doorway of the Grotto of the Sleepless Dragon, one apparently stands upon the edge of an abyss out of which come blasts of cold...

With thoughtful, tireless touch, the Unknown nursed the Breton through the fever that had fastened upon him the night he had cast aside the wife of Tai Lin and had brutally left...

While the Breton did not perceive it, the wife had in a way become less wilful, though her moods were yet as the river’s wind; her words as changeful as the mocking-bird’s song;...

The Brotherhood of Tien Tu Hin, swallowing in its deluge all degrees of mankind, likewise swallows now and then one of those nameless Europeans whom Fate has utterly cast adrift...

The monsoon, with its wrack and pain, passed away much in the manner as the man Tsang said it would; for the monsoon repletes more than it destroys, and the prayer that goes up...

Along the waterfront of the southern suburbs, which were penned in between the walls of the city and the river, ran a wide wooden bund that extended for some distance over the w...

It is necessary to go back some years prior to the time of the typhoon through whose swirl of devastation two priests from the French Mission of Yingching had struggled and surv...

The Breton went calmly out of the Hall of Guests and came unconcernedly down the Lion Steps into the Park as though without thought or in profound meditation. His head was throw...

The law does not procrastinate in China; and the execution of the wife was fixed on the following afternoon. When the sun rose that day out of a fogless sea it proved to be one...

Just south of where the Yangtse River empties into the ocean lies the Province of the Winding Stream—venerable and beautiful, with a history written back almost to that long hou...

While the weeks and then months that followed the Breton’s advent into the palace of Tai Lin were as widely different to the past years of his life as is sunlight to sorrow, yet...

Hangchau, the capital of Che Kiang, rests haughtily upon its hills in full view of the ocean. Its granite walls, more than thirty miles in circumference, higher than a four-stor...

What to man is the warring of a whole world of nations when his heart and soul wage their more terrible combat within him? What to him are the destruction of Empires and the ann...

A few days after the Breton had received his instructions from the bishop he was summoned to the palace of Tai Lin, thence peremptorily to an apartment belonging to his Excellen...

Few spectacles are ever given for man to witness more melancholy than the dissolution of an ancient dynasty; an end inevitably tragic and often leaving its solemn sign, as did t...

It is not a matter to wonder at that the Mission of Yingching was founded during the latter part of the sixteenth century,—an age known elsewhere for its deception and cajolery,...

Without hesitation the Breton once again entered the Palace of Tai Lin, and went quickly through its halls and courts until he came to the apartments of his Excellency’s wife. F...

The laugh of the wife, like her song, had departed. No longer it pealed through the rooms—nor its echo. Her laugh was gone; slowly, imperceptibly had it vanished as music stolen...

More than a year had passed since the Viceroy had married this farmer’s daughter from the Valley of the Fountain, which extraordinary event had been duly commented upon by the g...

I. PRO DEO ET ECCLESIA 65 II. THE SCHOLAR 72 III. HOMO! MUTATO! 80 IV. A DRAGON AND THE GROTTO 88 V. THE MONSOON 98 VI. A GIFT 111 VII. DAWN 121 VIII. THE DELUGE FAMILY 128 IX....