one--individual, race, or group of nationalities--but he would be ready to uplift, to urge onward to better things, to higher and more humane civilizations--a man to whom the world will yet listen attentively. By the side of Kand. Hoeck other men appeared superficial, they faded into insignificance, their very _raison d’être_ seemed trivial in the extreme. Of these others, the Americans were the more interesting: as a class more frank, more generous, men of greater nature and deeper soul; and they individually varied as much as the primary colours in the spectrum. There was one, a typical journalist, experienced, clever, adept and pushful. He came to us accompanied by a telegraph operator with an instrument and gear for tapping the wires, and a scheme for the exclusive use of the telegraph lines of North China by newspaper correspondents. He met a man, the offspring of a Chinese mother and British father, who clung to his mother’s nationality, and held with success a responsible position under the Russian administration--a man of great ability and some erudition, learned in the lore of the Chinese ancients, and modern Western philosophies. The American journalist seemed to have been astounded by the antiquity of China, the remoteness of its civilization, the wondrous perfection of its scheme of corporate social life. He unburdened himself to the official, taking him for a full-blooded Chinaman of unusual cleverness and much learning. He filled that man so full of hot air that he did not know to which world he rightly belonged, so great became his own idea of his own importance. The journalist went away, and the man talked to Etzel as he had talked to the other journalist. Now Etzel was as good a friend as ever breathed, and loved everything that lived, but he had an American’s conventional ideas with reference to the proper place of yellow-skinned men in the scheme of creation, and whether Chinaman, or half-Chinaman he did not rank this man so highly as the other journalist had done. The man took offence; he persisted in pressing upon Etzel the other journalist’s reasoned-out contention of the superiority of the Chinese; he refused to be assuaged by a friendly invitation to partake of the rough-and-ready supper they were eating in the Club; he even became quarrelsome, put his hand into the fold of his waistcoat; and Etzel, thinking he was trying to find his revolver, as he had threatened to do, just put out one hand towards that man’s face, sent him sprawling backwards and senseless on to the floor by the blow, and with the other hand held out his plate for more sausage. Ten minutes later that still unconscious man was borne to his room by the Chinese boys and a friendly newspaper man.