I was gathering together some examples of the strange opinions held by the Chinese as to "outer nations," when I fell upon a curious official document, presented to the emperor by a great mandarin, who occupies a very prominent place in the modern history of China, Keshen, once viceroy of the two Kwang. His name brought immediately to my recollection, by a very natural association, that of my old acquaintance, Father Huc, whose contributions to our knowledge of China, Tartary, and Tibet are among the most original authentic, and instructive that we possess. It is a matter much to be regretted that only a small part of Father Huc's personal adventures has ever been communicated to the public. I first met with him on one of the Chusan islands, dressed as a Chinaman, and living in every particular as the natives live--his food was rice--his drink was only tea. He was recognized as the director and instructor of no less than five Catholic communities. I had heard of the existence of professors of the Tien-choo (heavenly master) religion, and, going some way into the interior, found the Lazzarist doctor instructing the people. He had an extraordinary mastery of the colloquial Chinese; spoke and wrote Manchoo, and was not unacquainted with the Mongolian tongue. I enjoyed his company as a fellow traveller, having given him a passage in a vessel which was at my disposal, and I fell in with him in five different and distant parts of China. I have no doubt of the general veracity of his narrative, of his sincere love of truth--perhaps not wholly separated from a certain credulity and fondness for the marvellous, with which, I have observed, oriental travellers are not unfrequently imbued. It would be interesting to learn how Father Huc got to Peking, lived for many years in the city and its neighborhood, no one knowing or supposing him to be a foreigner--what were the arrangements by which, departing on his mission to Manchuria, he managed to escape from the scrutinizing eye of the police, at a period, too, when the determination to repel the intrusion of "barbarian strangers" was at its height. Of his interviews with Keshen, after the discovery of the objects of his journey, and the determination of the mandarin envoy to drive him out of the country, he gives many interesting particulars in his "Souvenirs," but he does not mention that Keshen, who had been stripped at Peking of some millions sterling, the gatherings of profits and peculations in the high offices he had filled, and who managed to amass a considerable sum of money in Tibet, confided his sayings in that country to the keeping of the Lazzarist missionary; and at the very time when the decree was issued for his banishment, Keshen obtained from him a promise that he would, when he passed into the {103} territory of China, deliver over "the silver" to the parties whom Keshen designated. Huc was a delightful companion; he had no asperity; on the contrary, he was full of jokes and merriment.