As he worked his way into the city the excitement mounted higher.  He took to the middle of the street where he could.  Mobs collected behind him and waved things at him and looked like they would lynch him; but they didn’t come close enough for that.  It seemed like he bore a charmed life in spite of this hostility.  When he’d got well into the city a policeman did come up and start to arrest him, but thought better of it and went round a corner.  It made him feel like a social cull or an outcast, or something.

He wasn’t a bit foolish about his cunning little pet by this time.  And it looked as if these crowds of people that gathered behind him would finally get their nerve up to do something with him.  They was getting bigger and acting more desperate.  When he was on the sidewalk he swept people off into the road like magic, and when he was in the street they would edge close in to the buildings.

It really hurt him.  He’d always liked Americans, in spite of their foreign ways, and they had seemed to like him; but now all at once they was looking on him as a yellow peril.  He still kept his rose to smell of.  He said it was a sweet comfort to him at a time when the whole world had turned against him for nothing at all.

He made for Chinatown by the quietest streets he could pick out, though even on them hardly escaping the lawless mob.  But at last he got to the street where Doctor Hong Foy’s office was.  It was largely a Chinese street and lots of his friends lived there; but even now, when you’d think he’d get kind words and congratulations, he didn’t.

His best friends regarded him as one better let alone and made swift gestures of repulsion when he passed ’em.  Quite a crowd followed at a safe distance and gathered outside when he went into Doctor Hong Foy’s office.  It was a kind of store on the ground floor, so Lew Wee says, with shelves full of rich old Chinee medicines that had a certain powerful presence of their own.  But even in here Doctor Hong Foy should of known beyond a doubt what his friend had brought him.

It seemed the doctor had to make sure.  He wasn’t of the same believing nature as the street-car people, and the German and others.  He wanted to be shown.  So they undone the sack and opened it down to where Doctor Hong Foy could make sure.  But their work was faulty and the wild animal didn’t like handling after its day of mistreatment.  It had been made morbid, I guess.  Anyway, it displayed an extremely nervous tendency, and many impetuous movements, and bit Doctor Hong Foy in the thumb.  Then the first owner tried to grab him and the pet wriggled away on to a tray of dried eel gizzards, or something, and off that to the open door.

The little thing run into the front of the large crowd that had waited outside and had a wonderful effect on it.  Them in the centre tried to melt away, but couldn’t on account of them on the outside; so there was fights and accidents, and different ones tromped on, and screams of fear.  And this brought a lot bigger crowd that pressed in and made the centre ones more anguished.  I don’t know.  That poor animal had been imposed on all day and must of been overwrought.  It was sore vexed by now and didn’t care who knew it.  Lots of ’em did.