"Is it true, Mr. Kong," asked a lesser one, who is
spoken of as vastly rich but discontented with her previous lot, of
this person upon an occasion, "is it really true that your countrymen
to not consider it right to speak of their fathers' names, even in
this enlightened age?" To this I replied that the matter was as she
had eloquently expressed it, and, encouraged by her amiable
condescension, I asked after the memory of her paternal grandsire,
whose name I had frequently heard whispered in connection with her
own. To my inelegant confusion she regarded me for a period as though
I had the virtue of having become transparent, and then passed on in a
most overwhelming excess of disconcertingly-arranged silence.
"You've done it now, Kong," said one who stood by (or, as we would
express the same thought, "You have succeeded in accomplishing the
undesirable"); "don't you know that the old man was in the tripe and
trotter line?"
"To no degree," I replied truly. "Yet," I continued, matching his
idiom with another equally facile, "wherein was this person's screw
loose? Are they not openly referred to--those of the Line of Tripe and
Trotter--by their descendants?"
"Not in most cases," he said, with a concentration that indicated a
lurking sting among his words. "Generally speaking, they aren't
mentioned or taken into any account whatever. While they are alive
they are kept in the background and invited to treat themselves to the
Tower when nice people are expected; when dead they are fastened up in
the family back cupboard by a score of ten-inch nails and three-trick
Yale locks, so to speak.
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