To
escape so humiliating a necessity, as the time drew near I would
address myself to another, one calling himself William, perchance, and
dwelling in a northern province, to whom I would be compelled to
assign my peach-orchard at Yuen-ping. Then by varying degrees of
infamy I would in turn be driven to visit a certain Bevel of the
Middle Lands, a person Edge carrying on his insatiable traffic on the
southern coast, one Grey elsewhere, and a Mr. Son, of the west, who
might make an honourable profession of lending money without any
security whatever, but who in the end would possess himself of my
ancestral tablets, wives, and inlaid coffin, and probably also obtain
a lien upon my services and prosperity in the Upper Air. Then, when I
had parted from all comfort in this life, and every hope of affluence
in the Beyond, it would presently be disclosed that all these were in
reality as one person who had unceasingly plotted to my destruction,
and William Beveledge Greyson would stand revealed in the guise of a
malevolent vampire. Truly that development has at this moment an
appearance of unreality, and worthy even of pooh-pooh, but thus is the
warning spread by your own printed papers and the records of your
Halls of Justice, and it would be an unseemly presumption for one of
my immature experience to ignore the outstretched and warning finger
of authority."
"Well, Kong," he said at length, after considering my words
attentively, "I always thought that your mental outlook was a hash of
Black Art, paper lanterns, blank verse, twilight, and delirium
tremens, but hang me if you aren't sound on finance, and I only wish
that you'd get some of my friends to look at the matter of borrowing
in your own reasonable, broad-minded light.
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