Page:Fifty Candles (1926).djvu/117

 pink candles in his hands, an’ he asked me to put them on the cake. ‘If I may make so bold, sir,’ I says to him, ‘whose birthday is it to-day? An’ he says to me, ‘It’s the Chinaman’s,’ he says. ‘It’s Hung Chin-chung’s.

“The Chinaman’s!” Mark Drew cried.

“But why should my husband give a birthday party for Hung Chin-chung?” asked Carlotta Drew, amazed.

“Just what I asks myself, ma’am,” Mrs. MacShane went on, “but Mr. Drew didn’t tell me. He just repeated that it was Hung’s birthday. ‘Yes, Mrs. MacShane,’ he says to me, ‘Hung was born fifty years ago to-day in a little house near some queen’s yard in Honolulu—out on that beach’—what is it now, the wan there’s all the songs about? Oh, to be sure!—‘out on the beach at Waikiki. Rh