life. Not that he ever worried over them. He was essentially a
philosopher, and whether as coolie, or multi-millionaire and master
of many men, his poise of soul was the same. He lived always in the
high equanimity of spiritual repose, undeterred by good fortune,
unruffled by ill fortune. All things went well with him, whether
they were blows from the overseer in the cane field or a slump in
the price of sugar when he owned those cane fields himself. Thus,
from the steadfast rock of his sure content he mastered problems
such as are given to few men to consider, much less to a Chinese
peasant.

He was precisely that--a Chinese peasant, born to labour in the
fields all his days like a beast, but fated to escape from the
fields like the prince in a fairy tale. Ah Chun did not remember
his father, a small farmer in a district not far from Canton; nor
did he remember much of his mother, who had died when he was six.
But he did remember his respected uncle, Ah Kow, for him had he
served as a slave from his sixth year to his twenty-fourth. It was
then that he escaped by contracting himself as a coolie to labour
for three years on the sugar plantations of Hawaii for fifty cents a
day.

Ah Chun was observant. He perceived little details that not one man
in a thousand ever noticed. Three years he worked in the field, at
the end of which time he knew more about cane-growing than the
overseers or even the superintendent, while the superintendent would
have been astounded at the knowledge the weazened little coolie
possessed of the reduction processes in the mill. But Ah Chun did
not study only sugar processes. He studied to find out how men came
to be owners of sugar mills and plantations. One judgment he