speeches and missionary reports to the contrary notwithstanding; but the Northern Chinese, as a rule, dissembles his feelings better than his brethren of the south. In a clumsy way he endeavours to make you believe that he enjoys your society-partly from a desire to avoid trouble (which by force of habit he associates with the foreign devil), and partly on the offchance of making something out of it. If he thus conceals his real feelings, it is also because of the memory of certain forcible object - lessons, and because nature and the race-mind have made him a pacifist philosopher. Therefore the the undisguised scowl on Kao's ugly face appealed to me as the shade of the tree of truth in a desert of make-believe. The very fact that he stood out as an unusual specimen of his race made me desire his better acquaintance. From one of the curio-dealers I learned that he was not a pukka Pekinese by birth, though he had spent most of his life in the city, and that in some matter connected with foreigners he had once" eaten much bitterness"; but as to the nature of that ancient grudge I could learn nothing. It may seem strange that I should have troubled my head about the surly fellow; but in China, when you have lived through half the rainy season seeing the same halfdozen white faces, discussing the same threadbare topics, and doing the same unprofitable

things day after day, you must either cultivate an intelligent interest in the life of the natives or take to drink; which may account for the consumption of whisky at the lesser Treaty ports.

In the natural order of things I might have gone on for ever fussing at the secret behind Kao's black looks. I knew that any attempt to conciliate him would be worse than useless, for when a European (either Government or individual) makes friendly overtures to hostile Orientals, it amounts to asking for trouble, and even where harmonious relations are established it is hard for us to get to know much about the inner thoughts of the Chinese. Time and much patience are needed to bridge the gulf which divides their philosophy of life from ours. So I had to content myself with chaffing the cantankerous fellow, and lashing at his yapping dogs whenever a chance offered.

But at the time of the heavy rains Fate intervened, and put me in the way of laying the idol-maker under a heavy obligation, probably the only one that he would ever have acknowledged. His younger son, a lad of about six, while flying a kite in the street of Filial Piety, stepped backwards into the open drain. He had fallen upon a bad day, for the drain, usually a dry ditch, was so swollen by the rains that it held a swift current. It would speedily have carried him to

wards the main street, where the drain becomes a brick tunnel, had I not chanced to be riding that way. Luckily, I was just in time to save the boy. A crowd collected, of course, in the twinkling of an eye, and a woman told me the half-drowned youngster was the son of Kao Shih-lan. I carried him into his father's shop.

Considering the procreative capacity of the race, and its consequently appalling infant mortality, it would seem as if one atom of Chinese infancy more or less should not matter very much; broadly speaking, of course, it doesn't. But this particular child, happening to be the only son of his mother (Kao's second wife), was a person of considerable importance in his own circle. It was interesting to see Kao struggling with his mixed feelings; gratitude won the day, but his surliness towards Europeans was a fixed habit not easily discarded at a moment's notice. He could not help thanking his gods that a foreigner had witnessed the accident, knowing that his own people are not given to interfering with Providence in cases of drowning. His rugged honesty was compelled to give us credit for a virtue that had touched him so nearly, so that before I could make my way through the crowd of womenfolk he had said several pleasant and courteous things. I went home, wondering whether his scowl would come back, and if not, whether I might some

day learn how and why he had "eaten bitterness "at the hands of white men.

66

After that eventful day Kao made an honourable exception in my favour in the matter of incivility. His two sons were taught to smile at me as I passed instead of shouting Yang Kuei-tzu" from behind the gate-screen, and sometimes on my way home I used to stop and smoke a pipe in his courtyard. He liked to talk about his trade, and told me curious tales about the little ways of the keepers of some of the shrines for which he made his ridiculous gods. Personally, he was not much of a believer in his own wares; indeed, his knowledge of the attributes of the various Buddhist deities was curiously vague, but he was very skilful in fashioning Buddhas, Kuan-yins, and the lesser gods, either of brass or lacquered wood. He used to let me watch him at his work, and after a while, when the weather grew cold, he would invite me to take a cup of tea in his inner room.

Thus it came about, one winter's afternoon some six months later, that he told me the reason of his hatred of foreigners in general, and Englishmen in particular. We were sitting on the mat - covered kang, and he was busy applying the first coating of goldleaf to a Lohan, destined to find its way to the British Legation, by way of the Lama Temple. He had been telling me that his father had lived

at Hai-Tien, some miles to the north of the city, and I had asked him how he and his people had fared when the British and French troops were in that neighbourhood in 1860, when the Summer Palace and the pleasure domes of YuenMing-Yuen were looted and destroyed.

'Tajen," he said, stopping in his work and filling a pipe, "I am a Chinese and you are from the outside countries, but you have saved the life of my son, and are to me as an elder brother. I have never spoken to you of those days, although they are always in my heart, but since you ask me I will tell you of the evil which they brought to me and to my house. When you have heard, you will understand why I do not love your people."

The story of that old-time grudge of his was a long one, and needed several cups, of tea in the telling. It dated back to the days when the Allied armies of England and France were camped in the Anting Plain. I shall not attempt to tell the whole tale as he told it, but will set forth the main facts, at the outset observing that, in order to realise Kao's conception of the seriousness of the outrage committed, one must remember the sacrosanctity of ancestors in the eyes of the Chinese.

On the day after the appearance of the Allied forces before the northern wall of Peking, Kao Shih-lan and his father were busy completing certain

repairs at the family burialground, a walled enclosure westward from Hai-Tien towards the hills. Like every one else, they had heard all sorts of alarming rumours about the ferocity of the invulnerable foreign devils, who had routed all the armies of the Son of Heaven, but no word had reached them of any sign of the invaders near Hai-Tien ; and in any case Kao's father had decided that the hardships and perils of flight outweighed the risks of sticking to his home. They were therefore terror-stricken when at sunset, just as they were leaving off work, a small body of Sikh cavalry ("big men with black faces and long lances," was Kao's description) suddenly came round a bend of the road, making straight towards them. There was no cover anywhere except amongst the fir-trees of the graveyard, so there they crouched. But, as luck would have it, the squadron was looking for a good place to pitch camp for the night, and chose the burial-ground, so Kao and his father were discovered. Having no weapons, they were not ill-treated, beyond being tied, with their queues together, to a tree, and losing their portable property at the hands of the Cantonese camp-follower who acted as interpreter. Later on, when the men had seen to their horses and sentries had been posted, the white officer in command ordered them to be untied. They were given some

food, and told that next morning they would be allowed to return to Hai-Tien. So far, they had been agreeably surprised at their treatment, for the rumour had been widely put about that the Indian soldiery were cannibals.

But when the black men came to prepare their food a terrible thing happened. For the cook, to save himself the trouble of making an oven, opened up the brick tomb of Kao's grandfather (an expectant Prefect of some fifty years' decay); moreover, he used the hard-wood coffin of that deceased worthy as a receptacle for garbage and the coffin-lid as fuel. The bones of the departed were unceremoniously strewn about. Kao's father implored the Cantonese to intercede for him with the white officer and prevent the sacrilege, but the scoundrel only laughed in his face. To crown all, another white man, who appeared upon the scene some hours later and remained chatting a while with the officer in command, noticed the skull of the expectant Prefect on the ground, picked it up, and, having tied it to his saddle, rode off with it into the night. Therefore, as Kao put it, his grandfather's ghost was condemned to wander miserably by the Yellow Springs of Hades for ten thousand years, while he himself was for ever shamed in the presence of the ancestral tablets.

Even in those early days I had learned enough about the

hoary tradition and superstitions of the Chinese concerning their dead, to realise that it would be useless to attempt to console the maker of graven images with any philosophical reflections on the futility of endeavouring to preserve intact our mortal coil, or to make him realise that the ultimate end of all skulls, whether in their graves or out of them, is the dust-heap. Nothing that I could say would alter the fact that, with this ancient people, a dead rogue hath more honour than a living paragon. paragon. As he unfolded the tale of his undying grudge, I realised how deeply he must have felt the desecration of that burial-ground, and could sympathise with his consequent hatred for all foreign devils, black and white.

But when he came to the end of the story and the purloining of his grandfather's skull, suddenly I perceived the long arm of coincidence putting its miraculous girdle round the earth. In a flash my mind went back to a room in a house amongst the heather and pines of the West Cliff at Bournemouth, a man's snuggery, all hung about with trophies of war and shikar in many lands. The room, to be precise, belonged to a Colonel Widdicombe, an uncle of mine, who as a subaltern in Desborough's battery had taken a hand in the shelling of the Summer Palace. And in that snuggery, as plainly as when first I discovered them in their