During those eight years, Errington had received very regular letters from a correspondent who signed himself Ting Chuh. At first these letters bored him; as he grew older they amused him; and latterly they had given rise to a certain perplexed curiosity. Why did Ting Chuh take so great an interest in him? Why was he continually poking his funny old proverbs at him? "An ox with a ring in his nose--so is the steady man." "Remember never to feel after a pin on the bottom of the ocean." "It is folly to covet another man’s horse and to lose your own ox." Sentences like these occurred in all Mr. Ting’s letters--all warning him against attempting impossibilities, or leaving the substance for the shadow, or letting his impulses run away with him. Of course Errington knew that Mr. Ting had occupied a special position in his father’s household, and he remembered vaguely that he had been quite fond of Tingy in his early years; but he was at a loss to understand why the Chinaman appeared to have constituted himself his moral guardian--why he sent for copies of all his school reports, and wrote him such exceedingly dull comments on them. "But he’s a good sort," he would say to himself, and forget the homily and Mr. Ting until the next letter arrived. Ting Chuh had made money while Mr. Errington lost it, through sheer native shrewdness and industry. The relations between master and man were very close and confidential. On Mr. Errington’s death, Mr. Ting set up for himself in business, and acquired wealth with wonderful rapidity; everybody trading on the China coast knew him and trusted him, except some few "mean whites" who were incapable of any decent feeling towards a Chinaman. He had now taken advantage of a business visit to London to call upon the boy in whose welfare he was more deeply interested than the boy himself knew. The time was approaching when Errington must leave school, and Mr. Ting had certain private reasons for wishing to judge by personal observation what manner of man had developed from the little boy of ten whom he had last seen on the deck of a home-going liner. Errington’s uneasy forebodings as to the result of the Chinaman’s appearance at the tea-table were agreeably dispelled. Mr. Ting was the hero of the hour. He talked fluently, with an occasional quaintness of expression that lent a charm to his conversation; and when it came out casually that his business in England had involved several interviews with the Foreign Secretary, he went up as high in the estimation of the prefects as his athletic feat had carried him with the younger boys. Moreover, at his departure he showed himself very generous and discriminating in the way of tips, and he was voted a jolly good sort by the school. He was particularly cordial in his good-bye to Ted Burroughs. "I hope to see you again befo’e long," he said, "and I thank you for yo’ kindness."