The difficulty, owing to its episodical character, of presenting the early career of Baltazar, thus finds illustration. One might go back to schoolboy days and point to lapses from grace, followed by similar swift and ruthless decisions. To catalogue them all would require the patient tediousness of formal biography. Apart from such a process, his life up to his flight into the moorland wilderness can best be pictured by a series of flashes. A sudden disgust with China and an overwhelming nostalgia for the sweeter political life of England drove him home after eighteen years. The greater part of the time he had spent in the impenetrable heart of the vast country, speaking many dialects as well as the classical Wen-Li of the learned, an encyclopædia of erudition, saturated with intimate knowledge of Chinese custom and observance, a Chinaman in all but physical appearance, dressing, living, acting and accepted universally as a Chinaman, prospering as a Chinaman too in financial undertakings. It was old China that he entered, a land stable in its peculiar civilization which, in spite of many traditional oppressions and time-sanctioned cruelties, had its fascination and grace—the gift to a Mandarin of a precious and much-coveted ancient manuscript had purchased the life of a boy, Li Quong Ho, condemned to elaborate death for a venial offence, the transaction being carried out in an atmosphere of high refinement, and scented tea served and drunk with exquisite punctilio. It was old China that he had learned to love, with its sense of beauty, its reverence for learning, its profound ethical philosophy. But it was a new China, convulsed with new ideas, bloodthirsty, treacherous, unstable to maddening point, that he had quitted in his sudden and determined way. For eighteen years, in the interior of China, he had lived remote from European politics. He had sunk himself in the lore, and identified himself with the interests, of that ancient land. With no correspondence, beyond the reach of newspapers, he all but forgot the existence of Europe. Meeting his fellow-countrymen on the homeward voyage, he shunned them, partly through shyness, partly through distaste for the brusqueness of their manners, the high pitch of their voices, their colossal ignorance of the country with which they boasted such contemptuous familiarity, the narrowness of their outlook, the petty materialism of their conversation. He held himself aloof, longing for the real England at the end of the voyage.