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like that in my classroom!’ she said severely. ‘I say stop it—do you hear me?’
    “Since she spoke in English the sergeant understood nothing that she said. He looked at her as a tomcat looks at a furious mouse.
    “‘What is this foreign female saying?’ he asked me.
    “‘She begs you to desist,’ I translated.
    “‘Tell her you are arrested,’ he ordered.
    “‘I am arrested,’ I said to Miss Maitland in English.
    “‘What for?’ she demanded.
    “‘I do not know,’ I replied truthfully.
    “‘That’s silly!’ Miss Maitland cried. ‘Ask him, the big beast! And tell him I say he is a beast!’
    “But I dared only say to the sergeant, ‘This honorable foreign lady, who is our teacher, asks why I am arrested.’
    “‘Tell her it’s not her affair,’ the sergeant replied loftily.
    “‘He says he is not allowed to say,’ I translated to Miss Maitland.
    “‘Now that’s just too silly!’ Miss Maitland said. ‘Tell him to get out and stop interfering—tell him he can’t come arresting my students like this—I’ll speak to the British consul!’
    “I hesitated.
    “‘Tell him all I said!’ Miss Maitland commanded.
    “‘She says,’ I began, ‘she will ask her consul to inquire—’
    “The sergeant glared at Miss Maitland, but she glared back, and he turned away with dignity.
    “‘I was told to arrest you,’ he said more loftily.
    “‘But why?’ I now demanded for myself.
    “‘Oh, what’s all this about?’ Miss Maitland cried.
    “But before she could say another word the sergeant shouted to the soldiers, ‘Forward, march!’ Instantly the soldiers seized my arms and I was hustled out before anyone could help me—if, indeed, I could have been helped. The students all sat silent and still as stone, and Miss Maitland only screamed.
    “I was marched down the street, and then into a great gate and thrust into the jail. I had written of this jail in my composition.
    “‘We have also a model prison in our country,’ I had written. ‘It is said that prison is one of the best in the world, and American and English visitors go to see how well China treats her captives in her model prison.’
    “Now I was thrust into a cell in this prison and the door was locked. It was, as a matter of fact, not uncomfortable at all. I think I must have been the first one there. It was clean—not as you saw it when hundreds had been through it. The cell was much better than most of the little earth huts in which the villagers lived in my home village, and indeed quite as good even as the tiny room I had been able to afford when I had first come to school in Shanghai, before I was given a room in the dormitory. In the cell there was a board bed, a dark blue cotton quilt, quite clean, and some bricks piled into a seat, and the small window. The house in which I had spent my childhood had no window at all. But then the door was open to the threshing floor, which was also the dooryard, so that the wide sky was always to be seen. As a small boy I sat on the high doorstep and watched my father and mother threshing wheat or beans and sifting out the chaff and husks in the strong dry winds. But the food in the prison was certainly better than what I had as a child.
    “The food, in fact, was so good that I enjoyed it and when I had finished my breakfast of rice and salt fish, with a bit of bread, on the second morning, I could not believe that in such a beautiful prison I would not receive the utmost justice. Besides, I told myself, this new government was just. They would allow me to explain at the trial. Every morning I thought, ‘Today I shall be summoned.’ I had long prepared in my mind what I would say. Lying upon the board bed at night, and staring at the square of sky by day, I planned every word until it was put together something like this.
    “‘Sirs, I beg you, of what am I accused? I belong to no revolutionary party.’ For at that time, I-wan, I did not. It was only afterwards that