Page:Mr. Wu (IA mrwumilnlouisejo00milniala).pdf/173

 never entered—a well-kept brick edifice, taller and better built than many houses in that quarter, painted a dull light blue, and owned and inhabited by a Chinese apothecary who was infamously famous throughout the Empire.

It looked an innocent house, clean and law-abiding. It was lightless, and each of its shutters was tightly closed; but at midnight—a quarter-past midnight now—that it was darkened and closed but added to its air of trim respectability. And yet, to this quiet blue house half the poisoning crimes in China were attributed by the native and the European authorities alike—attributed, but not one ever traced.

The authorities had raided the place again and again, but always uselessly. Nothing incriminating was ever found—nothing but the ordinary wares of a well-stocked apothecary: glass bowls of Korean ginseng-plant roots (one, five inches long, was worth ten pounds, and a little of its dust would give vigor to the old, hair to the bald), skins of black cats and dogs (stewed, they prevent disease, and are the best hot-weather diet), musk, rhubarb and silk-covered packets of dragons' blood (invaluable medicinally, but not what it sounds—a dry resinous powder scraped from Sumatra rattan), cups of rhinoceros' horn, skins and horns ground into powdered doses, antidotes to poison, or guaranteed to impart the qualities of the animal which it had protected or adorned. Horns of cornigerous animals hung in tidy rows, and formed a conspicuous part of the stock-in-trade, for they give the human partaker strength and courage, still silly nerves, quell fearfulness. A pyramid of the hoofs of young deer, specific to inculcate fleet gait, half-screened the chief treasure of the place: a lacquer cabinet of hearts. There were three hearts, each in its own well