As soon as the operation was over, we suggested that we must be returning home, but this could not be allowed until we had partaken of further refreshment, and servants appeared with delicacies--meat balls in gravy, flavoured as only a Chinese cook can flavour, lotus seeds in syrup, luscious fruits, sweetmeats, and a drink of apricot kernels, sweet to excess. The meat balls were daintily wrapped in pastry, and as she helped me to some of these, the _Tai-tai_ said: "I think you do not care for pork." I replied that we did not as a rule eat much pork. "I am so glad," she said: "these are fowl, and therefore you can eat them without fear." A few days later we heard that the head cook was under severe punishment and incarcerated in a dungeon, because he had not taken the trouble to find out what were our special tastes in matters of the table, and had served pork in place of fowl! Some years later he was a patient in our Refuge, and told Mr. Wang that he would like to make a feast for us. We thought this extremely kind of him, considering what he had suffered on our behalf, and he was asked to our kitchen to prepare the food, while we invited some friends to share it with us. I think he was a man of preconceived ideas rather than a genius at making inquiries, whatever his talent in the culinary art, for he said he knew foreigners liked sweet things, and he served us twenty or more courses of the sweetest food it has been my good fortune to eat! Our visit proved to be the commencement of a most friendly intercourse. A few days later the outrider, cart, and retainers were at our door again, this time escorting the ladies who had come to return the call. They enjoyed the outing considerably, as is easy to see they would, when one remembers that they had lived three years in Hwochow and had now crossed the threshold of their home for the first time during that period. They could have no intercourse at all with the bourgeoisie of the town, and apart from visitors staying at the _Yamen_, enjoyed no social life. In due course we were invited to an "eight times eight" feast, consisting of elaborate courses, in which the sweet, the fishy, and the meaty alternated in bewildering miscellany, whilst our vision was delighted by the elegant dishes, the lovely coral china, the pure form of the many-branched candlesticks, and, above all, the graceful, gay little ladies who manipulated the difficult, slippery food with such a masterly command of their nimble chop-sticks. Here for the first time I tasted the delicious birds'-nest soup, gelatinous in consistency and fishy in taste, being, in fact, a mass compounded of seaweed and small fish into a nest by a sea-bird.