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"You see, Mister my good friend, my countryman, he tell Boss about my white pearl. I lorse him now." "But you got two more in your pocket" "Yes, very good pearl; but not good like my snow pearl. I am sick now. Boss he sack me. I land Thursday Island. I gamble fantan. I no care. Soon I hab no pearl at all. I hab no work. I am hard up.

Hop Yet smiled a trifle himself, wore his cap with a red button on the top to wait upon the table, and ministered to the hungry people with more interest and alacrity than he had shown since he had been dragged from Santa Barbara, his Joss, and his nightly game of fantan.

These fantan shops, of which there may be twenty or thirty, are all licensed and kept under strict supervision, being farmed out to rich syndicates by the Portuguese authorities, the large sums thus realised forming no inconsiderable part of the colony's revenue.

Under lamps, the shaven foreheads still bent toward microscopic labor. The curtained window of a fantan shop still glowed in orange translucency, and from behind it came the murmur and the endless chinking of cash, where Fortune, a bedraggled, trade-fallen goddess, split hairs with coolies for poverty or zero.

At almost every corner we pass crowds of poor wretches gambling in various modes, from fantan down to dice and dominoes.