We none of us liked the _locum tenens_ Wing had provided, and hearing of a Chinaman who was leaving a neighbouring ranch where the family had gone East, we engaged him. He was a tall, fat man, with a very stately way of carrying himself, and from his airs most evidently considered himself a “beau.” It was in the month of January when he was with us, and in the early mornings it was rather too cold to be comfortable with his thin white cotton jacket only, so he wore over this a wadded sleeveless jacket made of soft Chinese silk of a most lovely golden bronze colour, which made him look very grand indeed. Like Wing, too, he seemed very generous, and had not been with us long when he produced from somewhere a large jar of very good Chinese preserved ginger, which he brought in upon a tray, together with a little Chinese box of “welly fine tea.” It was given with a gracious, lordly air, and I accepted it with the finest manner and the best compliments I could muster. Again in a few days he brought a sweet-scented Chinese lily, growing in a bowl, which I knew he had been tending in his bedroom till it should bloom; and a packet of his quaint writing-paper, which I had admired one day when I chanced to see him writing letters, he brought with the same grave courtesy. But he had already been some months in the country, and soon wearied of the quiet of our place. He came one day and told me that he had urgent business to attend to in China, and must leave us and sail very shortly for his Celestial fatherland. So he went, and every time I go to the little Chinese store now I see him there, and we smile in a most friendly fashion to each other, while he serves me and asks if we are all well, and neither of us is so ill-bred as to refer to that “business in China”! During the winter months the town of San Miguel is quite crowded with Eastern visitors; all the hotels and boarding-houses are full, and every Chinaman who is worth his salt, is engaged, at a good wage too. The only men who are at liberty are the blacklegs, the gamblers, and opium fiends. So, though our friend at the agency bureau did his very best for us, he could not save us from such a time of worry and annoyance as I can hardly bear to look back upon. We were all over-worked, tired out, and had illness in the house as well. For three months we had such a succession of Chinese blackguards as makes my flesh creep to remember. Some of them stayed one day, some two or three, some a week; but we became positively ashamed of driving into El Barco station, taking in and bringing out different Chinamen.