Higginson and his high family along with him. Let the word go out
to him. I leave it to you."

And Ah Chun sat and smoked on, and in the curling smoke-wreaths he
saw take shape the face and figure of Toy Shuey--Toy Shuey, the maid
of all work in his uncle's house in the Cantonese village, whose
work was never done and who received for a whole year's work one
dollar. And he saw his youthful self arise in the curling smoke,
his youthful self who had toiled eighteen years in his uncle's field
for little more. And now he, Ah Chun, the peasant, dowered his
daughter with three hundred thousand years of such toil. And she
was but one daughter of a dozen. He was not elated at the thought.
It struck him that it was a funny, whimsical world, and he chuckled
aloud and startled Mamma Achun from a revery which he knew lay deep
in the hidden crypts of her being where he had never penetrated.

But Ah Chun's word went forth, as a whisper, and Captain Higginson
forgot his rear-admiralship and his high family and took to wife
three hundred thousand dollars and a refined and cultured girl who
was one thirty-second Polynesian, one-sixteenth Italian, one-
sixteenth Portuguese, eleven thirty-seconds English and Yankee, and
one-half Chinese.

Ah Chun's munificence had its effect. His daughters became suddenly
eligible and desirable. Clara was the next, but when the Secretary
of the Territory formally proposed for her, Ah Chun informed him
that he must wait his turn, that Maud was the oldest and that she
must be married first. It was shrewd policy. The whole family was
made vitally interested in marrying off Maud, which it did in three
months, to Ned Humphreys, the United States immigration