The quay was lined with Chinese houses, two‐ or three‐storied, with arched verandahs. The _Heungshan_ ran alongside, the hawsers were made fast, and gangways run ashore. The Chinese passengers, carrying their baggage, trooped on to the wharf. One of them in his hurry knocked roughly against a Portuguese Customs officer who caught him by the pigtail and boxed his ears in reward for his awkwardness. It was a refreshing sight after the pampered and petted way in which the Chinaman is treated by the authorities in Hong Kong. There the lowest coolie can be as impertinent as he likes to Europeans, for he knows that the white man who ventures to chastise him for his insolence will be promptly summoned to appear before a magistrate and fined. Our treatment of the subject races throughout our Empire errs chiefly in its lack of common justice to the European. Seated in a ricksha, pulled and pushed by two coolies up steep streets, I was finally deposited at the door of the Boa Vista Hotel. This excellent hostelry—which the French endeavoured to secure for a naval hospital, and which has since been purchased by the Portuguese Government—was picturesquely situated on a low hill overlooking the town. The ground on one side fell sharply down to the sea which lapped the rugged rocks and sandy beach two or three hundred feet below. On the other, from the foot of the hill, a pretty bay with a tree‐shaded esplanade—called the Praia Grande—stretched away to a high cape about a mile distant. The bay was bordered by a line of houses, prominent among which was the Governor’s Palace. Behind them the city, built on rising ground, rose in terraces. The buildings were all of the Southern European type, with tiled roofs, Venetian‐shuttered windows, and walls painted pink, white, blue, or yellow. Away in the heart of the town the gaunt, shattered façade of a ruined church stood on a slight eminence. Here and there small hills crowned with the crumbling walls of ancient forts rose up around the city.