Even Heywood sat listening—­with more attention than respect, for once he muttered, “Rot!” Toward the close, however, he leaned across and whispered, “The old boy reels it off rather well to-night.  Different to what one imagined.”

Rudolph, for his part, sat watching and listening, surprised by a new and curious thought.

A band of huddled converts sang once more, in squealing discords, with an air of sad, compulsory, and diabolic sarcasm.  A few “inquirers” slouched forward, and surrounding the tall preacher, questioned him concerning the new faith.  The last, a broad, misshapen fellow with hanging jowls, was answered sharply.  He stood arguing, received another snub, and went out bawling and threatening, with the contorted face and clumsy flourishes of some fabulous hero on a screen.

The missionary approached smiling, but like a man who has finished the day’s work.

“That fellow—­Good-evening:  and welcome to our Street Chapel, Mr. Hackh—­That fellow,” he glanced after the retreating figure, “he’s a lesson in perseverance, gentlemen.  A merchant, well-to-do:  he has a lawsuit coming on—­notorious—­and tries to join us for protection.  Cheaper to buy a little belief, you know, than to pay Yamen fines.  Every night he turns up, grinning and bland.  I tell him it won’t do, and out he goes, snorting like a dragon.”

Rudolph’s impulse came to a head.

“Dr. Earle,” he stammered, “I owe you a gratitude.  You spoke to these people so—­as—­I do not know.  But I listened, I felt—­Before always are they devils, images!  And after I hear you, they are as men.”

The other shook his great head like a silver mane, and laughed.

“My dear young man,” he replied, “they’re remarkably like you and me.”

After a pause, he added soberly:—­

“Images?  Yes, you’re right, sir.  So was Adam.  The same clay, the same image.”  His deep voice altered, his eyes lighted shrewdly, as he turned to Heywood.  “This is an unexpected pleasure.”

“Quite,” said the young man, readily.  “If you don’t mind, padre, you made Number One talk.  Fast bowling, and no wides.  But we really came for something else.”  In a few brief sentences, he pictured the death in the shop.—­So, like winking!  The beggar gave himself the iron, fell down, and made finish.  Now what I pieced out, from his own bukhing, and the merchant’s, was this:—­

“The dead man was one Au-yoeng, a cormorant-fisher.  Some of his best birds died, he had a long run of bad luck, and came near starving.  So he contrived, rather cleverly, to steal about a hundred catties of Fuh-kien hemp.  The owner, this merchant, went to the elders of Au-yoeng’s neighborhood, who found and restored the hemp, nearly all.  Merchant lets the matter drop.  But the neighbors kept after this cormorant fellow, worked one beastly squeeze or another, ingenious baiting, devilish—­Rot! you know their neighborhoods better than I!  Well, they pushed him down-hill—­poor devil, showing that’s always possible, no bottom!  He brooded, and all that, till he thought the merchant and the Jesus religion were the cause of all.  So bang he goes down the pole,—­gloriously drunk,—­marches into his enemy’s shop, and uses that knife.  The joke is now on the merchant, eh?”