I could scarcely resist a smile as I bowed apologetically. I imagined myself repeating this conversation to Wilhelm II., a ruler not inclined to take too low an estimate of his own consequence. ‘This rebellious Viceroy,’ the Chinese courtier proceeded, ‘has had the unheard-of arrogance to require that a Prince of the Manchu dynasty shall travel to his unknown province to express regret for the death of its envoy at the Imperial Court.’ This announcement did not come to me as news. In passing through Pekin I had learned that one of the conditions of peace was that a Chinese Prince should go to Berlin to tender the Imperial apologies to the Kaiser for the murder of the German Ambassador during the Boxer rising. The interpreter went on-- ‘You may be able to understand faintly how such a proposal must strike the Imperial ears, by imagining the case of a negro king in the heart of Africa requiring Queen Victoria to send one of her sons to prostrate himself in his kraal, because some accident had happened to one of his slaves in London.’ I listened in silence to this illustration, which showed me that the Dowager Empress was pretty well acquainted with the political distinctions prevailing among those whom she professed to regard as savages beneath her notice. ‘It is, of course, impossible,’ the courtly interpreter went on, ‘for the Brother of the Sun and Moon to submit to this degradation, even if it were safe to expose one of the Imperial House to the dangerous magical arts of the West. It is rumoured that you have diabolical contrivances called kodaks; now it is evident that if one of the Race of Heaven were kodaked, the Sun himself might avenge such an insult by refusing to shine upon the earth.’ He said all this with a perfectly serious air. But from the expression on the face of the Empress I fancied her Majesty was a little wearied of this fulsome strain. I ventured to bring him to the point. ‘Will you tell me what her Imperial Majesty desires me to do?’ ‘Her Majesty graciously condescends to confide in you. Her slaves who reside among the Western viceroys have assured her that you respect the precept of the great Khung--“The counsellor who betrays his lord’s secret and the child who bites his mother, these are too base to be pardoned.”’ ‘Go on,’ I said, becoming slightly impatient. ‘It being impossible to do what the German Viceroy asks, and her Majesty being benevolently anxious to spare him the humiliation of a refusal, there has been sought out a man of the people, a barber in the Tartar city of Pekin, whose features Heaven has permitted to bear a certain resemblance to those of his Imperial Highness, Prince Chung.