The next crushing blow came, not from heaven, but from the Viceroy, in the form of a letter to the tao-tai. This admirably worded screed set forth that it having come to the ears of the most exalted Viceroy that the country on which the honourable Lao Ng Tau held jurisdiction was in a very disturbed state owing to the presence of certain lawless bands, which bands plundered the subjects of the Son of Heaven, the honourable Lao Ng Tau was herewith ordered to suppress the same and send the heads of their leaders to Peking _pour encourager les autres_. The order concluded with a mild suggestion that the tao-tai’s own head might possibly adorn a spike in the Imperial city should the rebels not be suppressed within the month. With so much to worry him in his private affairs, Lao was nearly distracted by this order, but as an officer of the State he realised that private grief must give way to Imperial demands. So he hastened to equip a military force to engage and subdue the bands of robbers which now formed such a menace to the peace of Sung Ying Fu. Starting with a gay band of troops, armed with banners, umbrellas, matchlocks, singing birds in cages, and other deadly weapons affected by the Chinese soldier, Lao proceeded against the rebels. At the first brush with the enemy the tao-tai’s glittering rabble deserted to a man to the opposing force. Lao, after a gallant resistance, was himself overpowered and taken prisoner and carried by his captors to the hills. He learnt from his captors that during his absence on this punitive expedition his relations had held high revels in his house, and were entertaining continuously on a lavish scale, and that the would-be star-gazers were so continually in a state of intoxication that the discovery of a lucky day on which to bury Mah Su was likely to be indefinitely postponed. The news of Lao’s capture soon reached the Viceroy, who at once informed the Government, with the result that the vermilion pencil issued an edict that Lao Ng Tau, late tao-tai of Sung Ying Fu, was to be beheaded, his head to be forwarded to Peking, his property confiscated, his house razed to the ground, and the land on which it stood to be ploughed up to a depth of two feet, and that should his schoolmaster be still alive, that that miserable individual should receive one hundred blows with a bamboo. The worst punishment of all, however, was the final one, namely, that Lao’s great-grandfather, dead some sixty years, should be degraded from the rank of mandarin of the first to mandarin of the third class. On receipt of this news Lao’s anger was awful, and the chief of the robbers, choosing this opportunity to request him to become their chief and war on Society, was at once met with a hearty acceptance.