on the beggar woman by my side, the lost Lady Om, and sighed and shook their heads while their eyes dimmed with tears.  And there were young women whose faces warmed with compassion as they gazed on the bulk of my shoulders, the blue of my eyes, and my long yellow hair—­I who had once been a prince of Koryu and the ruler of provinces.  And there were rabbles of children that tagged at our heels, jeering and screeching, pelting us with filth of speech and of the common road.

Beyond the Yalu, forty miles wide, was the strip of waste that constituted the northern frontier and that ran from sea to sea.  It was not really waste land, but land that had been deliberately made waste in carrying out Cho-Sen’s policy of isolation.  On this forty-mile strip all farms, villages and cities had been destroyed.  It was no man’s land, infested with wild animals and traversed by companies of mounted Tiger Hunters whose business was to kill any human being they found.  That way there was no escape for us, nor was there any escape for us by sea.

As the years passed my seven fellow-cunies came more to frequent Fusan.  It was on the south-east coast where the climate was milder.  But more than climate, it lay nearest of all Cho-Sen to Japan.  Across the narrow straits, just farther than the eye can see, was the one hope of escape Japan, where doubtless occasional ships of Europe came.  Strong upon me is the vision of those seven ageing men on the cliffs of Fusan yearning with all their souls across the sea they would never sail again.

At times junks of Japan were sighted, but never lifted a familiar topsail of old Europe above the sea-rim.  Years came and went, and the seven cunies and myself and the Lady Om, passing through middle life into old age, more and more directed our footsteps to Fusan.  And as the years came and went, now one, now another failed to gather at the usual place.  Hans Amden was the first to die.  Jacob Brinker, who was his road-mate, brought the news.  Jacob Brinker was the last of the seven, and he was nearly ninety when he died, outliving Tromp a scant two years.  I well remember the pair of them, toward the last, worn and feeble, in beggars’ rags, with beggars’ bowls, sunning themselves side by side on the cliffs, telling old stories and cackling shrill-voiced like children.  And Tromp would maunder over and over of how Johannes Maartens and the cunies robbed the kings on Tabong Mountain, each embalmed in his golden coffin with an embalmed maid on either side; and of how these ancient proud ones crumbled to dust within the hour while the cunies cursed and sweated at junking the coffins.

As sure as loot is loot, old Johannes Maartens would have got away and across the Yellow Sea with his booty had it not been for the fog next day that lost him.  That cursed fog!  A song was made of it, that I heard and hated through all Cho-Sen to my dying day.  Here run two lines of it: