You can count them any day for yourself. Of course I know, and I
know for a fact."
GLEN ELLEN.
October 2, 1916.
THE TEARS OF AH KIM
There was a great noise and racket, but no scandal, in Honolulu's
Chinatown. Those within hearing distance merely shrugged their
shoulders and smiled tolerantly at the disturbance as an affair of
accustomed usualness. "What is it?" asked Chin Mo, down with a
sharp pleurisy, of his wife, who had paused for a second at the
open window to listen.
"Only Ah Kim," was her reply. "His mother is beating him again."
The fracas was taking place in the garden, behind the living rooms
that were at the back of the store that fronted on the street with
the proud sign above: AH KIM COMPANY, GENERAL MERCHANDISE. The
garden was a miniature domain, twenty feet square, that somehow
cunningly seduced the eye into a sense and seeming of illimitable
vastness. There were forests of dwarf pines and oaks, centuries
old yet two or three feet in height, and imported at enormous care
and expense. A tiny bridge, a pace across, arched over a miniature
river that flowed with rapids and cataracts from a miniature lake
stocked with myriad-finned, orange-miracled goldfish that in
proportion to the lake and landscape were whales.
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