We sailed on Wednesday, and on Sunday made the first tropic, nearly twenty-three and a half degrees above the line.  No rough weather or unkindly wind had disturbed us from the hour we had left the “too nyked” man upon the wharf, and Sunday, when I went to take my bath before breakfast, I felt the soft fingers of the South caress my body, and looking out upon the purple ocean, whose expanse was barely dimpled by gleams of silver, I saw flying-fish skimming the crests of the swinging waves.  The officers and stewards appeared in white; the passengers, too, put off their temperate-zone clothes, and the decks were gay with color.  We all seemed to feel that we must be in consonance with the loving nature that had made the sky so blue and the sea so still.

The Chinese—­he was Leung Kai Chu on the list—­did not change his melancholy black.  The deck sports were organized, ship tennis, quoits, and golf, and the disks rattled about his feet; but though he often moved his chair to aid those seeking a lost quoit or ring, and bowed ceremoniously to those who begged his pardon for bothering him, he kept his position.  I felt a somber sense of gathering tragedy.  In his face was a growing detachment from everything about him; he hardly knew that we were there, that he ate and slept, and took his seat by the boat.  All of us felt this, but with many it meant merely remarking that “the Chink is getting off his head,” and a wish that he would not obtrude his grief when we were filled with the joy of sunny skies and a merry company.

The tragedy came sooner than expected by me.  I had cast a thought to my understanding that the philosophy of Confucius did not contemplate self-destruction, and had been divided between relief and wonder that it was so.

It was dusk of Monday.  The sun had sunk behind the glowing rim of the western horizon, and the air was suffused with a trembling rose color, when Leung Kai Chu tapped at my cabin-door, which gave on the boat-deck.  I opened it, and he bowed, and handed me an image.  It was of porcelain, precious, and I was at a loss to know whether he had felt the need of a little money and had brought it to sell, or had been impelled to give it to me because of my feeble efforts to cheer him.  I made a gesture which might have meant payment, but he raised his hand deprecatingly, and for the first time I saw him smile, and I was afraid.  He bowed, and in the mandarin language invoked good fortune upon me.  He had the aspect of one beyond good and evil, who had settled life’s problem.  When he left me I stood wondering, holding in my hands the majestic god seated upon the tiger, the symbol of the conquest of the flesh.