Hark, —his tortured catgut squals He tickles every string, to every note He bends his pliant neck.—The fond yielding Maid Is tweedled into Love.

As it nears the sea at Chinkiang, the point at which it makes its entrance into our story, it broadens out into a mile-wide flood, following a serpentine course through flat, marshy country, its waters stained the colour of milk chocolate by its heavy load of alluvial silt and impeded by innumerable islands and sandbanks that vex the way of the navigator. This is the Yangtse—the Yangtse of the low-lying province of Kiangsu, from the ancient walled city of Chinkiang to the open sea—upon whose waters and along whose banks we shall live and move in this story.

Her father was a fisherman, and her family fed itself by crofting--age-old, small-plot, subsistence farming—living in a modest gray pebble-dash house, surrounded by a landscape of properties local historians and genealogists characterized with terms like “human wretchedness” and “indescribably filthy.”

We can imagine that the Δ points in [Δ] are drawn clockwisely on a circle of circumference Δ, in the order 0, 1, 2, …, Δ − 1, such that every two adjacent points have distance 1 on the circle.