Everywhere the wandering members of the great Peddlers’ Guild carried word of me, of my comings and goings and doings, to Chong Mong-ju at Keijo.  Only twice, in all the days after my downfall, did I meet Chong Mong-ju face to face.  The first time was a wild winter night of storm in the high mountains of Kang-wun.  A few hoarded coppers had bought for the Lady Om and me sleeping space in the dirtiest and coldest corner of the one large room of the inn.  We were just about to begin on our meagre supper of horse-beans and wild garlic cooked into a stew with a scrap of bullock that must have died of old age, when there was a tinkling of bronze pony bells and the stamp of hoofs without.  The doors opened, and entered Chong Mong-ju, the personification of well-being, prosperity and power, shaking the snow from his priceless Mongolian furs.  Place was made for him and his dozen retainers, and there was room for all without crowding, when his eyes chanced to light on the Lady Om and me.

“The vermin there in the corner—­clear it out,” he commanded.

And his horse-boys lashed us with their whips and drove us out into the storm.  But there was to be another meeting, after long years, as you shall see.

There was no escape.  Never was I permitted to cross the northern frontier.  Never was I permitted to put foot to a sampan on the sea.  The Peddlers’ Guild carried these commands of Chong Mong-ju to every village and every soul in all Cho-Sen.  I was a marked man.

Lord, Lord, Cho-Sen, I know your every highway and mountain path, all your walled cities and the least of your villages.  For two-score years I wandered and starved over you, and the Lady Om ever wandered and starved with me.  What we in extremity have eaten!—­Leavings of dog’s flesh, putrid and unsaleable, flung to us by the mocking butchers; minari, a water-cress gathered from stagnant pools of slime; spoiled kimchi that would revolt the stomachs of peasants and that could be smelled a mile.  Ay—­I have stolen bones from curs, gleaned the public road for stray grains of rice, robbed ponies of their steaming bean-soup on frosty nights.

It is not strange that I did not die.  I knew and was upheld by two things:  the first, the Lady Om by my side; the second, the certain faith that the time would come when my thumbs and fingers would fast-lock in the gullet of Chong Mong-ju.

Turned always away at the city gates of Keijo, where I sought Chong Mong-ju, we wandered on, through seasons and decades of seasons, across Cho-Sen, whose every inch of road was an old story to our sandals.  Our history and identity were wide-scattered as the land was wide.  No person breathed who did not know us and our punishment.  There were coolies and peddlers who shouted insults at the Lady Om and who felt the wrath of my clutch in their topknots, the wrath of my knuckles in their faces.  There were old women in far mountain villages who looked