It is well known that Chinese doctors are only rewarded for cures and for keeping their patients well. A physician was called in to see a sick tax-collector (yamen runner). “You’ll have to call in another doctor,” said the physician. “Am I so bad that you must have a consultation?” inquired the alarmed patient. “No. You will remember, however, if you have as good a memory as I, that last week you searched high and low and taxed me the last cash on the limit of my property and maximum income. I have too much conscience to kill you, but I’m honest enough to say that I want as little as possible to do with curing you, so good-by.” There are more Chinese Macks and Mc’s in Canton and Hongkong than in all Argyleshire, Scotland. I recall a particularly droll character, Mak, who was our godown-man at West Point, Hongkong. Mak (we never called him his personal name, which was Fun) was in full charge of the warehouse, and came to the office twice a month with proper accounts, which always checked up with the yearly inventory. When, by appointment, I went down to supervise that inventory, all was as it should be. Mak had a clean warehouse, in which neither rats nor coolies were tenants, and his wharf was kept free of junks and sanpans. I returned unexpectedly one day and found Mak collecting wharfage for himself from junks which he had allowed to tie up at the wharf, and rent from coolie families whom he had allowed to camp, with possibly their plague Bacillariaceæ, between the aisles of gunny bales in the godown. Longfellow speaks of “folding their tents like the Arabs and silently stealing away,” but on this occasion, the retreat of the enemy with their camp paraphernalia was accomplished with both confusion and noise, because of the haste involved. “How is this, Mak?” I shouted as a stern typan should. “Oh, cousins overnight, you sabee; plenty bobbery, but Confucius says, shelter your kin,” Mak blandly replied. I made him assure me that they were all sailing for parts known or unknown on the morrow, but I knew that if I caught them there again, they would be “other cousins” who had claimed hasty hospitality under the same law and the same necessity. There was only one way to match the blandness of Mak Fun, or any other godown-man, and that was to move in myself. As Mak was in other respects a good godown-man, I was blind in the port eye thereafter to this adaptation of the “cumshaw” by the clan of Chinese Macks, though as I passed, to quote from the same verse of Longfellow’s poem, “the night was filled with music” in Chinese Mak’s direction. The Chinese accept the saddest thing in the world in a droll cheerful manner. A son, who had grown prosperous in Hongkong, sent his father, who lived in the silk district outside of Canton, a splendid lacquered coffin, which he was to keep before him in the best room for friends to see. The son’s letter said: “Here is something gorgeous for The Event” (that is, his father’s death).