Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1904 edition. Excerpt: ... new Little Tragedy at Tien-Tsin Mrs. Wing Tee sat on a pile of mats on top of her big oven-bed in her apartment; the fire beneath the bed was lighted, for the season was somewhat chilly already, and the gentle warmth diffused itself not only within the room, but throughout the reception-hall, which adjoined and gave upon the court. Miss Wing Tee, aged three years, was in the arms of her nurse, amusing herself with some toys in a corner of the court. Ah Chang, Mrs. Wing Tee's husband, was away from home, having been absent some time now on a business trip to Peking. Mrs. Wing Tee was smoking; she had been in Peking herself once at a mission school, whither she had been taken by an excellent American lady when her father and mother and little brothers and sisters had all died of the fever. At the mission school Wing Tee had learned several things and seen many people. There came one day to visit the school some student interpreters from the British embassy, young men whose pursuit of knowledge was proportioned very equally between seriousness and levity; among them one in particular, Cecil Winton, who was eking out hope and a small salary by newspaper correspondence, and the vividest, most impassioned sort of letters to Miss Violet Urquhart, of Chesteron-Dee. Wing Tee had only stopped in Peking at the mission school a short time when her uncle, Sam Wah, who had been in America founding an importing house in New York at the period of her wholesale bereavement, returning to China, and learning of his young niece's whereabouts, instantly came to the mission school, and reclaimed his brother's daughter from the clutches of the foreign devils and the insidious influences of the churches; forbade her ever communicating with her benefactors again...
