Excerpt from The River Dragon's Bride Doubtless that most honorable cognomen was borne by a hundred generations, or mayhap a thousand before him. It was as Handy Andy that the American Woman Doctor introduced him to me in her crude little Hos pital of the Good Shepherd back in the old city of Ancestral Abodes. This most ancient and delectable city lies in the very heart of those purple mountains which enwrap the path of the Ming River, remote from here, it seems to me to-day, a million miles. The trail I followed, at whose finish I found the city, the hospital, and finally Handy Andy, is a thousand years old - it may be ten times that for all I know. Was not the dreamy old river on whose tide our house boat floated spanned by the Bridge of Ten Thousand Ages, whose hoary grayness gave it every evidence of being true to name? About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.