Those were the last of the days when the China trade was in the hands of a few great houses; when the wonderful yearly ocean race took place to land the first cargo of tea in London; when the opium-clippers from Bombay would lie under Pok-Fa-Lum, land the supercargo and wait till he and the house to which his ship was consigned had made the price and then sail gallantly round the corner into Hong Kong. Vast fortunes were made in opium, silk and tea, and right royally were they spent. The men who used up their lives in unhealthy climates, far away from home and family, sacrificing much and often suffering much, felt that they had a right to find what compensation they could in making their banishment tolerable; but what they seemed to delight in more than aught else was in welcoming those fellow countrymen whom duty or pleasure carried within possible range of their kindness. There were no hotels in the old days, but any man who had a letter for one of the great houses would be sure of as hearty a welcome as if he had been an old and a dear friend. Our one port of call was Chifu, a quaint little seaside town with rather a pretty background of hills, used as a sea-bathing place by some of the Europeans in North China. Here it was that a few months before a not very large packing-case was delivered, which, on being opened, was found to contain human fragments which were the remains of the traitor Burgevine, an adventurer who, having been first in the service of the Imperial Government, went over to the Taiping rebels, and finally falling into the hands of the Imperial army, was sentenced to death by Ling Chi—hacking to pieces in small morsels, the punishment of high treason. Here I made the acquaintance of a notable man, one of those heroes who disappear, unknown and unrecorded, swallowed up by some cataclysm of fate before the world has had a chance of knowing what it has lost. Mr. Thomas was a missionary sent out by the London Missionary Society to China; he had a real genius for acquiring languages—speaking French, German, Russian, without having had any facility save his own talents and industry. It was not long before he attained quite a considerable proficiency in the spoken language of northern China, but when he had been eighteen months in the country he was called upon by the Society to preach in Chinese. This he refused to do, for he was too clever a linguist not to be aware of the pitfalls created by a modicum of knowledge, and he declined to make Christianity ridiculous. So he and the Society parted, and he continued to work, living upon a miserable pittance as best he might.