It was about six months after the disappearance of Mrs. Tretherick that Ah Fe, while working in Tretherick’s lot, was hailed by two passing Chinamen.  They were the ordinary mining coolies, equipped with long poles and baskets for their usual pilgrimages.  An animated conversation at once ensued between Ah Fe and his brother Mongolians—­a conversation characterized by that usual shrill volubility and apparent animosity which was at once the delight and scorn of the intelligent Caucasian who did not understand a word of it.  Such, at least, was the feeling with which Mr. Tretherick on his veranda and Colonel Starbottle, who was passing, regarded their heathenish jargon.  The gallant colonel simply kicked them out of his way; the irate Tretherick, with an oath, threw a stone at the group, and dispersed them, but not before one or two slips of yellow rice paper, marked with hieroglyphics, were exchanged, and a small parcel put into Ah Fe’s hands.  When Ah Fe opened this in the dim solitude of his kitchen, he found a little girl’s apron, freshly washed, ironed, and folded.  On the corner of the hem were the initials “C.  T.”  Ah Fe tucked it away in a corner of his blouse, and proceeded to wash his dishes in the sink with a smile of guileless satisfaction.

Two days after this, Ah Fe confronted his master.  “Me no likee Fiddletown.  Me belly sick.  Me go now.”  Mr. Tretherick violently suggested a profane locality.  Ah Fe gazed at him placidly, and withdrew.

Before leaving Fiddletown, however, he accidentally met Colonel Starbottle, and dropped a few incoherent phrases which apparently interested that gentleman.  When he concluded, the colonel handed him a letter and a twenty-dollar gold piece.  “If you bring me an answer, I’ll double that—­sabe, John?” Ah Fe nodded.  An interview equally accidental, with precisely the same result, took place between Ah Fe and another gentleman, whom I suspect to have been the youthful editor of the Avalanche.  Yet I regret to state that, after proceeding some distance on his journey, Ah Fe calmly broke the seals of both letters, and after trying to read them upside down and sideways, finally divided them into accurate squares, and in this condition disposed of them to a brother Celestial whom he met on the road, for a trifling gratuity.  The agony of Colonel Starbottle on finding his wash bill made out on the unwritten side of one of these squares, and delivered to him with his weekly clean clothes, and the subsequent discovery that the remaining portions of his letter were circulated by the same method from the Chinese laundry of one Fung Ti of Fiddletown, has been described to me as peculiarly affecting.  Yet I am satisfied that a higher nature, rising above the levity induced by the mere contemplation of the insignificant details of this breach of trust, would find ample retributive justice in the difficulties that subsequently attended Ah Fe’s pilgrimage.