We rode back to Chang Ping Chou, our horses terrified at the great images, in which heaven knows what horrors they saw. It was a lovely night, and the harvest moon rose in full glory. After supper I was impelled to go back, at any rate as far as the mysterious Avenue of Statues. I felt that, like Melrose, it should be visited “by the pale moonlight.” I am glad that I had that inspiration. When I reached the avenue the moonbeams were casting their spell upon the great, silent, motionless procession. Grim and gruesome flickers were playing upon the marble features, showing a sort of life in death; near the further end a vagabond crew—in England we should have said of gipsies—had encamped for the night, and were crouching round their fire, smoking. The flames cast dancing and uncertain lights and shadows upon the giant figures till I half felt as if they were moving. Far away in the gloom were the thirteen shrines, half hidden, nestling among the dark, pine-clad hills—altogether a weird and ghostly scene which I can never describe, but which lives with me to-day, after all these years. * * * * * The event of our lives in the autumn of 1865 was the arrival of the new British minister, Sir Rutherford Alcock, with his family, in succession to Sir Frederic Bruce. Sir Rutherford was an able man who would probably have made his mark in any profession and in any position. But he had so fitted his life to the peculiar exigencies of China and of the public service in that country, where he had been for many years a Consul, that his name as the follower of Sir Frederic was indicated. CHAPTER XVII 1865 PEKING Mr. Alcock’s first great promotion to be Consul-General in Japan, newly opened to foreigners by Lord Elgin’s treaty of 1858, though it answered well enough, was based upon a mistake of the English Government, which was under the delusion that China and Japan were one and the same thing, and that experience in the one country must of necessity specially fit a man to take up work in the other. It was like what Victor Hugo said when he was asked whether he had ever read Goethe. “Non, mais j’ai lu quelques traductions de Schiller; et après tout, Goethe-Schiller, Schiller-Goethe, c’est toujours la même chose.” Well, China and Japan were anything but “la même chose,” and perhaps Mr. Alcock’s life and experiences in China were rather a hindrance to him than otherwise, as they undoubtedly were in the case of some of the first merchants who established themselves there.