“I think I was born in a sampan in Hong Kong harbour; of that I’m not certain; but anyway, my earliest recollections are of living in a boat which was managed entirely by my father and mother; and there we lived, cooked, fed, and slept. We used to also take foreigners off to their ships, and from their ships to the shore, but the best times were at night. At dusk my father would get a tough string net out of the sleeping-place amidships. Each mesh of this net was heavily weighted with leaden bullets, and he’d attach it in some clever manner to the inside of the bamboo shelter we carried in the stern sheets. Mother used to steer and work a yulo aft. Father pulled an oar and managed our one sail, and any passengers we had sat under the bamboo shelter in the stern sheets. “At night time our passengers were generally drunk, and by a simple contrivance father could pull a string when we got some way out in the harbour. The weighted net would then fall on the semi-unconscious passenger, and father and mother with a few stabs finished him off. Then came the counting of his possessions, the stripping of the body, and the throwing over of the corpse, to be found or not, as fate decided. “I remember once we got a fare well after dark. He was a huge, yellow-haired man, very drunk, and, I think, a Scotchman. Father and mother worked the sampan out in the harbour, and then father pulled the string. The net fell, and he made two good jabs into the writhing bundle with his knife. The man kicked and fought horribly. He tore the net, nearly broke the gunwale of the boat, and at last got hold of father’s ankle in his teeth just above the heel. Father jabbed away with his knife, and didn’t dare to howl, and mother had to drop the tiller and come and help with the meat chopper. She tore our net badly, but killed the man, and then father’s ankle was released from the dead man’s mouth, also with the chopper. We found less than a dollar on that Scotchman, and my parent was lame from the bite for the rest of his life. “Although I was very young at that time, still some of the incidents, insignificant as they were, are impressed on my memory. “We used to have a heavy iron bar with iron grapnels, with which we dragged for drowned bodies—and not without success, in those days; but they often had little more than the clothes on them, so we never became very prosperous.