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child!” He began to laugh suddenly and he stopped his eating and sat chuckling for a long time in the dusk of the room.
    But Wang Lung stood listening at the door to those heavy animal pants. A smell of hot blood came through the crack, a sickening smell that frightened him. The panting of the woman within became quick and loud, like whispered screams, but she made no sound aloud. When he could bear no more and was about to break into the room, a thin, fierce cry came out and he forgot everything.
    “Is it a man?” he cried importunately, forgetting the woman. The thin cry burst out again, wiry, insistent. “Is it a man?” he cried again, “tell me at least this—is it a man?”
    And the voice of the woman answered as faintly as an echo, “A man!”
    He went and sat down at the table then. How quick it had all been! The food was long cold and the old man was asleep on his bench, but how quick it had all been! He shook the old man’s shoulder.
    “It is a man child!” he called triumphantly. “You are grandfather and I am father!”
    The old man woke suddenly and began to laugh as he had been laughing when he fell asleep.
    “Yes—yes—of course,” he cackled, “a grandfather—a grandfather—” and he rose and went to his bed, still laughing.
    Wang Lung took up the bowl of cold rice and began to eat. He was very hungry all at once and he could not get the food into his mouth quickly enough. In the room he could hear the woman dragging herself about and the cry of the child was incessant and piercing.
    “I suppose we shall have no more peace in this house now,” he said to himself proudly.
    When he had eaten all that he wished he went to the door again and she called to him to come in and he went in. The odor of spilt blood still hung hot upon the air, but there was no trace of it except in the wooden tub. But into this she had poured water and had pushed it under the bed so that he could hardly see it. The red candle was lit and she was lying neatly covered upon the bed. Beside her, wrapped in a pair of his old trousers, as the custom was in this part, lay his son.
    He went up and for the moment there were no words in his mouth. His heart crowded up into his breast and he leaned over the child to look at it. It had a round wrinkled face that looked very dark and upon its head the hair was long and damp and black. It had ceased crying and lay with its eyes tightly shut.
    He looked at his wife and she looked back at him. Her hair was still wet with her agony and her narrow eyes were sunken. Beyond this, she was as she always was. But to him she was touching, lying there. His heart rushed out to these two and he said, not knowing what else there was that could be said,
    “Tomorrow I will go into the city and buy a pound of red sugar and stir it into boiling water for you to drink.”
    And then looking at the child again, this burst forth from him suddenly as though he had just thought of it, “We shall have to buy a good basketful of eggs and dye them all red for the village. Thus will everyone know I have a son!”

4
    T HE NEXT DAY AFTER the child was born the woman rose as usual and prepared food for them but she did not go into the harvest fields with Wang Lung, and so he worked alone until after the noon hour. Then he dressed himself in his blue gown and went into the town. He went to the market and bought fifty eggs, not new laid, but still well enough and costing a penny for one, and he bought red paper to boil in the water with them to make them red. Then with the eggs in his basket he went to the sweet shop, and there he bought a pound and a little more of red sugar and saw it wrapped carefully into its brown paper, and under the straw string which held it the sugar dealer slipped a strip of red paper, smiling as he did so.
    “It is for the mother of a new-born child, perhaps.”
    “A first-born son,” said Wang Lung proudly.
    “Ah, good fortune,” answered the man carelessly, his eye on a