It is afternoon, and the great slumbering ocean breathes, but not with the quick, palpitating tide of the Atlantic.  The smuggler sits on the oleaginous sea, tinged to ochreous yellow, waiting for evening and the confederate junk.  The tropic twilight comes on swift red-golden wings that fan the vivid stars to brightness, and the rising tide breaks the surface into wrinkles of phosphorescent fire.  High over head is the wide, unbroken canopy of the Pacific sky, and the gush of a larger moon than ours fills all the sphere with splendor as the huge ship stirs lazily in its Narcissus poise over its own reflection.  There is a reddish glow in the western horizon over Hong-Kong, a fainter glimmer west by south over Macao, and farther west and north the reflected glories of the sacred city of Canton.  The three make a semicircular crescent, like a great floating moon, on the horizon.  A coral islet juts out between the cities under which the huge smuggler affects to play “I spy”—­only affects, for she does not care for the authorities she bribes nor the laws she despises.

But the wind draws up the curtain of cloud by strands of rainy cordage, and men aloft are loosing the reefed topsail, bracing the after-yards and setting them for a run in on the larboard tack.  They handle gaskets, bunt-lines, leech-lines, fix her best bib and spencer, like a country girl for a run up to town.  Men are swarming about the yards and rigging.  That is not all:  Lascars, stevedores, supercargoes, the hong merchants, agents, are all busy breaking bulk.  The India opium is covered with petals of the plant and stowed in chests lined with hides and covered with gunny; and these cases are locked in by stays, spars and bulkheads to prevent jamming.  Helter-skelter and confusion alow and aloft, on the yards, rigging, deck, between decks and under hatches.  The captain and purser are gloating over the sycee silver, for the Chinese government is as jealous of its exportation as of the importation of opium; and the sky and the sea are dark and angry.  In a slovenly way the sails are trimmed, and she edges clumsily around the point with the bullion and opium, the full freight and gains of a year’s voyaging and trading.  Half an hour or an hour hence she will be free, and the junk dropping down to sea with the drugs in her.  All at once a shriek or yell of “Hard aport!” and a great iron outward-bound steamer from Hong-Kong bursts into the unwieldy Chinaman, goes crunching through her like ripping pasteboard; tears her open; snarls through steamy nostrils and cindery fiery mouth, and growls over her wreck.  And the sodden, stupefied merchantman, as if drunk with opium, goes yelling and staggering with her sleepy drugs to the bottom, and stays there, sycee silver and all.