To the newly arrived naval or military officer society in Hong Kong is full of pitfalls and surprises. The English merchant or lawyer over seas is usually a very good fellow, though occasionally puffed up by the thought of his bloated money‐bags; but his wife is often a sad example of British snobbery, the spirit of which has entered into her soul in the small country town or London suburb from which she came. Society in the boarding‐houses of West Kensington is a bad preparation for the rôle of _grande dame_ in the hospitable East. And so the naval or military officer, accustomed to broader lines of social demarcation in England, is puzzled and amused at the minute shades of difference in Hong Kong society. He fails to see why Mrs. A., whose spouse exports tea, is to be considered quite of the _haut ton_ of the colony; while Mrs. B., whose husband imports cigars, and who is by birth and breeding a better man than A., is not to be called on. “Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so, _ad infinitum_.” And Hong Kong looks down on Kowloon with all the well‐bred contempt of Belgravia for Brixton. And even in the despised suburb on the mainland these social differences are not wanting. The wives of the superior dock employees are the leaders of Kowloon society; and the better half of a ship captain or marine engineer is only admitted on sufferance to their exclusive circle. When the first Indian troops to strengthen the garrison of Hong Kong in 1900 arrived, they were quartered in Kowloon; where the presence of a number of strange young officers, who dashed about their quiet suburb on fiery Arabs and completely eclipsed the local dandies, caused a flutter in the hearts of anxious mothers and indignant husbands. The fires of civilian prejudice against the military burned fiercely; and I verily believe that many of the inhabitants of Kowloon would have preferred an invasion of ferocious Chinese. THE KOWLOON HINTERLAND. The island of Hong Kong was ceded to England in 1841. Later on a strip of the adjacent mainland, from two to three miles deep, running back to a line of steep hills from 1,300 to 2,000 feet high, was added. Then for many years the colony rested content under the frowning shadow of these dangerous neighbours; until it dawned at last upon our statesmen that the Power who possessed this range of hills had Hong Kong at its mercy. For heavy guns planted on their summits could lay the city of Victoria in ruins at the easy range of two or three miles; and no answering fire from the island forts so far below them could save it. So in 1898, by a master‐stroke of diplomacy, China was induced to lease to England the Kowloon Peninsula, about 200 miles square; and our frontier was removed farther back to the safer distance of about twenty miles from Hong Kong.