But I had reckoned without the merry mosquito. I have met this little pest in many lands. I first made his acquaintance on the night of my arrival in India with a raw, unsalted regiment from home; when he could batten on seven hundred fresh, full‐blooded Britishers and feast to the full on their vital fluid unthinned by a tropical climate; when next morning the faces of all, officers and men alike, were swollen almost beyond recognition. I have remonstrated with him as to his claim to the possession of the interior of a mosquito net and failed to move him. I have scarcely doubted when a friend vowed that he had broken the back of a hairbrush over the head of one of the giant, striped species we knew as “Bombay tigers” or questioned the truth of the statement that a man had lain on his bed and watched two of them trying to pull open his curtains to get at him. I have cursed him in the jungle when sitting up in a _machân_ over a “kill” waiting for a tiger. I have wrestled with him when out on column and bivouacked beside a South China river, where his home was; but never have I seen him in such wonderful vigour and maddening persistence as during that night on the station platform of Shanhaikwan. In vain I beat the air with frenzied hands; in vain I smoked. I tried to cover my head with a sheet; but the heat was too great, and I emerged panting to find him waiting for me. As Thomas Atkins says: “It h’isn’t the bite of the beggar I ’ates so much as ’is bloomin’ h’irritatin’ buzz”; and the air was filled with his song. It was a concert with refreshments. _I_ was the refreshments. To make matters worse, I had the tantalising knowledge that I had mosquito curtains with me, which I had been unable to fix up as the bed was without poles. At last, maddened by the persistent attacks of the irritating pests, I sat up and reviewed the situation until I hit upon a plan. I shoved the bed under the windows of a room which looked out on the platform and which happened to be the quarters of the British Railway Station Officer. The venetian shutters opened outward. About ten feet away was a telegraph‐pole; and a short distance from the foot of the bed stood a lamp‐post. Taking the cords of my Wolseley valise, the straps of my bedding and my luggage, and some string which I looted from one of the railway offices, I contrived to suspend my curtains from the shutters, the pole, and the lamp‐post. It was really an ingenious contrivance, and I lay down in triumph and security. The baffled mosquitoes uttered positive shrieks of rage.