The three ships then returned to Hong-Kong, Helston taking Ping Sang back to the _Laird_ with him. Ping Sang and Dr. Fox dined that night with Helston, and that merry old Chinese gentleman, vastly pleased to be sitting once again in front of a good dinner, was amusing in the extreme. He made even the surly Doctor smile at his adventures, and very droll were the descriptions of himself sweating along the main road to Aberdeen loaded down with sugar-canes ("Beastly stuff! I can’t think why they eat it. Never knew what it was to earn a living of ten cents a day"); of being hauled along by his pigtail through a malodorous crowd of his countrymen to the police station ("Never knew I hated them before, till they began kicking me in the back"); of his struggles and protestations when the Englishman withdrew the charge and took him back to the junk; of his voyage to the island, shut down below in the stinking hold ("They didn’t go across that night, but hid round a corner till the next"), and of his imprisonment on the island, where he was a guest of the same Englishman ("That man is a precious scoundrel, I tell you, and his food was worse; but he did give me some decent clothes, I’ll say that for him"). The only one without a smile on his face was Jenkins, Helston’s marine servant, who had persisted in accompanying his master; but this was due, as Dr. Fox well knew, to the fact that he had been ashore that afternoon, and was now assuming an air of extreme sobriety only to be accounted for by a too liberal consumption of beer. He was an extraordinary man, this old soldier. He never went ashore without coming off half-drunk, and, as Helston often said, "he’s always most drunk when he’s most sober", and it was only by his preternatural solemness, or by noticing that he occasionally carried the dishes round the table at the double, that one knew that he had been making a brute of himself ashore. Time after time Helston had dismissed him and sent him for’ard to rejoin the Marine Detachment, but always, next morning, he was stealthily creeping about Helston’s cabin, folding up and brushing his clothes, and waking him at exactly the same time with "Six bells just gone, sir", and "’Ere’s your cup of tea". He had once managed to get rid of him by giving him "five days’ cells", but before he had finished this punishment Helston’s hair required cutting. No one could do this so well, so he was brought aft to do it, and, the job being satisfactorily concluded, Helston gave him one of his cigars, and twenty minutes to smoke it, before he was locked up again. On the sixth morning it was "Six bells, sir, just gone, sir, and ’ere’s your cup of tea", and he was now as much a permanent institution as the ship’s bell or the ship’s cat. Ping Sang had gained much interesting but no valuable information from the Englishman.