Wang the Ninth: The Story of a Chinese Boy

What happened subsequently came to the boy in a succession of odd surprises which he did not attempt to correlate. Camps sprang up in the night round the foreign quarter like cr...

Presently he felt better and began to take stock of the two other intruders. Though he was as bedraggled and as tired as if he had been ducked in a stream, his wits did not dese...

This humble affair settled, the elders of neighbourhood gathered to decide what should become of the boy and how the debt which had been incurred for the burial and the sickness...

He worked ceaselessly in his head at a plan of action as they cautiously approached the township, which had once been a place of importance but had now fallen into the greatest...

It was more than a day or two before he put into execution the plan suggested to him in such an unexpected manner. What alone fascinated him was the unknown. Like all his race,...

For many days no one in the neighbourhood saw or heard of the boy; he had disappeared as utterly as if the ground had swallowed him up. The neighbourhood gossiped about the inci...

This time his emotions were different from what they had been on his first lonely journey. Then the whole world had been spread before him like some feast, and his flight throug...

So two winters passed and the boy grew. He was wandering about one of the market-places when he caught his first glimpse of the thing which brought the great crisis in his life...

In the cool of the evening he walked on steadily hour after hour thinking of the priest, and sometimes wondering why he met no soldiers. He began to believe that things would no...

Noon found him asleep in the fields of _kaoliang_, that giant millet growing twelve feet high which is so dense that one may become lost in its golden tangle. Utterly worn out,...

Wang the Ninth was now no longer a child but a growing boy on whom his father cast jealous looks--as on so much capital that was not bearing due interest. Occasionally by dint o...

He did not know whether his companions had been killed or whether they had been merely robbed and left on the roadside; but their despairing cries sounded in his ears unendingly...

Some time later he was sitting with some newly-made friends, who had come in for protection because they had received foreign religion. They had built a sort of rude hut which h...

The revelation of profit-taking, which grew out of his chance adventure, was, however, the matter which most deeply impressed him. He had never conceived of earning-power so hig...

He showed infinite cunning in his advance. His sheltered life dropped from him like a discarded garment. Fortified by his long experience of vagabond days he displayed the cunni...

Deep calm followed that night. It was so calm the next morning that it seemed unnatural. Hardly a soul was abroad in the foreign quarter; and apart from some dozing foreign sent...

It was too early for there to be much movement in the streets; yet his expert ragamuffin eyes picked up signs which comforted him. He saw wheelbarrows full of country produce mo...

He knew this part of the outer city very accurately; for the great grain markets were here, and the farriers and the horse-doctors clustered thick where thousands of draft anima...

The soft, regular life into which he had fallen soon affected the boy queerly: he chafed and became openly moody. His simple duties were so easily performed that he had endless...

The river was less than a hundred yards wide here, and the five men and the boy had enough skill to get the boat across with rapidity. The big man with the iron-pronged stick, s...

Wang the Ninth was born a few years before the end of the nineteenth century in a village called prosaically in the vernacular Ten Li Hamlet because it lay ten _li_ or Chinese m...

The circumstances surrounding his first meeting with foreigners--those white-faced men and women of western race who had been nicknamed by the common people "foreign devils"--ha...

So it went on for several days with the dust of the marching army thick round him. He began to distinguish the many nationalities in this great throng, and to realize that there...

Within three days his father had set up a forge inside this rude hut at the city gate and had commenced turning out quantities of coarse iron nails for the cart trade. The clang...

One night a great, sullen roar reached him through the open stable-doors in confused waves of sound which ebbed and flowed as though some monster were being tortured in fits and...

In the morning the unaccustomed roar and noise of the city gate woke up the sleeping child. No comforting father's voice, however, answered its first stirrings and cries; so aft...

Soon after this his father began using him to carry his rudely fashioned iron-ware into the city, where it was handed over to middlemen who scrutinized every place with the eyes...

Ever after that incident the world seemed different. The ugly, independent child, accustomed to the rigours of the daily struggle for existence--all the acerbities of a life so...