with which the doctor dug up our little baby brother or sister from out of the parsley-bed—when story-books had that astonishing hold on me that, out of our town, I perfectly established the field along which Christian ran with his fingers in his ears when his neighbours tried to call him back. (And if ever there was a case for the parochial authorities of a man deserting his wife and children, Christian’s was one.) In this happy time I had associations with China, and they now come back from one of the most charming of the attractive stories in the _Arabian Nights Entertainments_. I was now looking—practically, with my own eyes—on a Chinese town, and a group of idle boys playing. A grave stranger of a foreign and travelled aspect was watching them. I should not have been at all surprised if he had recognized, in one of the urchins, the son of his dead brother—had clothed him at a ready-made tailor’s, and then introduced him, by lifting up a stone with a ring in it, to those wonderful nursery grounds of Hunt and Roskill, and Phillips, and Garrard, where the dew was all diamonds, and the wall-fruit all stones. And was it not likely that, in this very street, the stranger might have subsequently passed when anxious to exchange his new moderator lamps for any old argands, or solars, or camphines that might be dust-collecting about the house? Here again was an open space of ground, on which that palace might have stood, which went away one night in such a hurry. And strange to say, there _was_ a palace here, and it did disappear one early January morning. It belonged to that old miscreant Yeh, and its sudden absence was owing rather to the sponging of practical guns than the rubbing of wonderful lamps. And although I heard nothing, both here and at Hong Kong, but of Hall of the _Calcutta_, and Mr. Oliphant; Telesio’s pale ale “_chop_” (or boat store); John Dent’s French cook’s chow-chow; the arrival of the Fei-man steamer; Colonel Stevenson’s bamboo balcony on the hill: the 59th; Sir John Bowring and Mr. Chisholm Anstey: and innumerable “shaves:” yet _my_ thoughts ran upon Confucius and pagodas, nodding mandarins, chop-sticks, and the feast of lanterns, and above all, on Aladdin.