The coolies of the towing guild knew the
freaks and whims of the currents, and grappled, and raked, and
netted a wet harvest from the river. They of the guild were looked
up to by lesser coolies, for they could afford to drink brick tea
and eat number four rice every day.
And Ah Kim had been contented and proud, until, one bitter spring
day of driving sleet and hail, he dragged ashore a drowning
Cantonese sailor. It was this wanderer, thawing out by his fire,
who first named the magic name Hawaii to him. He had himself never
been to that labourer's paradise, said the sailor; but many Chinese
had gone there from Canton, and he had heard the talk of their
letters written back. In Hawaii was never frost nor famine. The
very pigs, never fed, were ever fat of the generous offal disdained
by man. A Cantonese or Yangtse family could live on the waste of
an Hawaii coolie. And wages! In gold dollars, ten a month, or, in
trade dollars, two a month, was what the contract Chinese coolie
received from the white-devil sugar kings. In a year the coolie
received the prodigious sum of two hundred and forty trade dollars-
-more than a hundred times what a coolie, toiling ten times as
hard, received on the eleventh cataract of the Yangtse.
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