Often I wondered what took him to sea; with his literary tastes, which must have developed very young, he would have been so perfectly suited to a student’s career, so entirely at home installed in the comfortable arm-chair of some common room, sipping his port after a good dinner in hall at the end of a day congenially spent in the thumbing of folios and quartos. He would have been an ideal Don—he _was_ a splendid seaman. My old shipmate has probably long since gone to his rest. If he be yet alive, my duty to him! If not, may that rest be peace! He was a genial, honest, cultivated gentleman, and there are many less worthy names whose memory has been celebrated by far defter pens than mine. When I left Shanghai for Tientsing on the 11th of May I was at last alone in the world. Up to that time I had had a succession of pleasant companions on board; now, besides the very offensive native families huddled in the steerage, who, when the sun shone, spent their time in the hunting of fleas—and worse—there was but one other passenger—one of the curious waifs and strays of Europe who at that time used to float about the China Sea, hoping to get a job, if not out of the Peking Government, at any rate out of some provincial Governor or local mandarin. I suppose that they sometimes succeeded; at any rate they were always ready to stake their small capital upon the venture; if they failed, when the hundred or two of dollars were spent they went under and joined the seething mass of undesirables who used to loaf about the open ports, picking up a meal and a drink—oftenest a drink—wherever the fates would be kind. It was a dull voyage through a leaden sea into which we steamed after a thick fog had sent us hard and fast aground on one of the treacherous shoals of the Yang Tsě Chiang. Then came a spell of dirty weather, till we reached the fine broad headland of the Shantung promontory with the outlying rocky islands, which are the danger of this part of the China sea. There was a strong colony of rats on board, and in the great river we had shipped a host of the most ravenous mosquitoes, whose singing was almost as bad as their biting. Altogether a trip that is best forgotten. There was plenty of time to think over all the wonders that I had seen since leaving Suez—Mount Sinai—the yellow desert of Eastern Africa; the fiery rocks of Aden; the palm groves of Ceylon, lapped by the waves of the Indian Ocean; the nutmeg orchards of Penang scenting the air; the pineapple hedges of Singapore; brown huts teeming with even browner life, lifted above the fever-swamps like the old lake-dwellings of the men who lived before history was; Canton, with its narrow streets and many-coloured, gilded perpendicular signs, as if a pantomime procession had been suddenly arrested and turned to stone by the head of a Medusa. But above all, the boundless hospitality and kindness of the merchant princes of Hong Kong and Shanghai.