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tell about certain robbers who lived near a lake. When he told them, every one, man or woman or child, they all leaned forward to hear what would come next and when he paused at some point where a man lay caught in a trap or a battle was about to be fought and passed his basket for pennies, they rained into it like hail on a ripe rice field.”
    Wu Lien looked at her proudly.
    “You have hit on exactly the right book,” he said. “That is the one, my brother,” he said. “It has everything in it, and all the women who deceive their husbands are punished and the righteous prevail. It is a naughty book sometimes, but the naughty ones are always punished and go down in battle before the others. The name of the book is Shui Hu Chuan, and it is full of righteous robbers. Yes, I read that book when I was a small boy and I could read it again.”
    He began to pull his fat underlip, smiling as he did so, and remembering the pleasure he had once had in the book. Lao Er rose and repeated the name of the book and thanked them and bade them good-bye and was making his way through the shop, now crowded with many customers, when he was stopped by the sound of quarreling voices. These voices shouted so loud and so suddenly that everybody stopped buying and turned their heads toward the wide door of the shop. Lao Er found himself held there by an army of young men with rocks and sticks in their hands.
    In front of them was their leader, a tall young man who wore no hat and his long hair fell over his eyes. He brushed it away and shouted at a clerk to open a case. When the clerk delayed, he took up the rock in his hand and crashed it through the glass of the locked case.
    “Enemy goods!” he cried in a high voice.
    He put in both his hands and lifted out watches and pens and trinkets and threw them into the street, and the moment he did this all the young men rushed in and began to break the cases and to throw out the goods, and a great groan went up from the customers at such waste of good stuff, though there were some who seized what they could get and made off with it, and as fast as the stuff was thrown into the streets, the people there fell upon it. When the young men saw this they were twice as angry as before and they rushed out and beat the people with their sticks and cracked their heads with the rocks they held until the people fell back. Then some of the young men stood guard over the goods that the others threw out and set fire to them, and shirts and coats and blankets and knitted goods and hats and shoes went into the fire. All around the blaze the crowd stood, their hungry eyes fixed in horror upon such waste but no one dared to say a word. Lao Er stood there, his mouth hanging open at all he saw, but he, too, did not dare to say a word. His brother-in-law did not come nor was there any sign of a clerk left now in the shop, and who was he, one man, to speak if these did not? He watched until his heart was sickened and he went away.
    He was halfway to the city gate before he remembered that he had forgotten to buy his book, and so he turned back to the street of booksellers and went to the table next to the little bitter man and asked for the book. The bookseller tossed it to him, a thick old book dirtied with many who had read it.
    “A dirty book like this must be cheap,” Lao Er said, looking at the spots of grease and black.
    “So it might have been a few days ago,” the bookseller said, “but in the past few days many of the students have come to buy this book who never read it before. Ask me why and I have no answer. I do not know why they do anything, those young ones. They are like drunk men and as for the women—” He spat on the stone on which he stood and rubbed it with his foot.
    “What is the price?” Lao Er asked.
    “Three silver small pieces,” the bookseller replied.
    Lao Er stared in horror.
    “For a book?” he shouted.
    “Why not for a book?” the old man retorted. “You spend as much on a