was chosen, and two middlemen engaged, who came and compared the day and the hour of my birth with that of the lad they suggested. Then followed a feast, when the agreement was made and my future fixed.
The home of my future husband was some little way off, and his father was a broken-down scholar, who kept a small school, and was a slave to opium. The lad was his youngest son. The mother bore a bad reputation for quarrelling and scolding, so you may imagine I didn't look forward with much pleasure to entering my new home, and hoped the day was far off. But it came sooner than I expected.
When I was about seven years old, I began to notice that father was away a great deal at night, and that we didn't get much to eat. The furniture slowly disappeared, and our clothes were poor and scanty. My mother seemed anxious, and cried much. I found out the meaning of it one day when I caught sight of father slinking into a dirty hovel near by, which I knew to be an opium den. Alas, he had become a victim to the "foreign smoke"! Day by day the craving grew upon him, and every scrap of money he could get went in opium, and mother had to support herself and me by making shoes and washing clothes. Father ate but little, and gave mother so little money that we were nearly starved. In the morning, before the craving came on again, he was very miserable and bad-tempered. He cursed himself and the English who, he said, had brought this evil on China; yet he couldn't break away from the habit, and things grew worse and worse.
