     Io matter how ill he felt, he would always make a doctor's visit when called upon."
     Every day he had over one hundred patients, but payments were less than fifty."
     When he was asked to charge it, he would never charge those who did not look able to pay."
     I heard these reminiscences and many others from the townspeople.
     It was not the first time I had heard these stories, but I was compelled to think them over for the first time.

     I could only think of him as a completely selfless man when he was tending the sick, and even more so when he was not.

     When the funeral procession went through town, for the first time I saw people offering prayers by the roadside. People offered fruit and lit incense along the road when the funeral procession passed by.

     It is said that usually roadside prayers and offerings are for the funerals of the wealthy, where the poor ask for some money in return, but that was definitely not the case this time.

     Hiding around the corner of a street was an old woman praying as she wiped her tears away.

     Perhaps she had no means of making a roadside offering, or perhaps the common roadside offering could not have expressed her feelings?

     Either way, I saw her precious tears.

     Tears not meant for anyone to see . . .

     A spring flowing from her heart that will never run dry.

[Selected from Taiwan bungaku (Taiwan Literature), vol. 3, no. 2, April 1943.]

Yang K'uei (1905-1985), born in Tai-nan, an active advocate of the socialist movement and proletarian literature in the thirties, known for his short story, "The Newsboy," which won the second prize in a contest sponsored by Bungaku hyôon (Literary Review). After the war he started to write and publish in Chinese. His collections include O-ma-ma ch'u-chia (Mother Goose Got Married), and Ya-pu-pien te mei-kuei-hua (A Rose That Cannot be Pressed Flat).

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