Arrived here, I at once plunged into the study of eastern languages and history and religion which I had begun at Home, earning my bread the while by odd jobs of journalism--though not always the brand of journalism I should have chosen if I hadn't been starving when I did it. Those early days were about the most desperately thin period of a life which has never run to fat. Later on my name got to be better known, and my pen better paid, and I might in time have aspired to a sedate competence if I had been able to purvey the kind of orientology the public expects. Unfortunately, I wasn't. That sort of orientology I found to be too full of elementary error, too much given to vague and shallow report compiled in the study with the help of other men's books, to commend itself to me. I soon saw that such things as native life and the native point of view couldn't be soundly written about by any man who had not gone _fantee_ himself, for the information gets very distorted even when it comes through the medium of servants and hired teachers and the tame type of native who prides himself on his foreign friends. The art of living "native" was about the first I set myself to learn when I came to the country, and ever afterwards, when I wanted facts, I dived into the raw mass of yellow humanity to get those facts direct, and I passed them on exactly as they had come to me. It was good orientology, but bad policy for a penniless journalist largely dependent on the favour of his fellow scholars to get work at all. I became an "outsider," a blackleg, in more or less perpetual bad odour. It was annoying, naturally, for the accepted authorities to have certain of their pet mis-statements, which had been handed down from generation to generation after being blindly cribbed in the first place from the writings of some sinologue long dead, abruptly exploded by that one real, first-hand, naked fact I had collected from the folk of the Far East in person. The wider my knowledge and experience grew, the more of these venerable bearded errors I found it necessary to kill off, and my popularity in learned circles steadily dwindled. The culminating point came when I published my best known and least conciliatory work under the title of _Treasure of Asia_. Every scholar in the land, and a host of people who couldn't by any stretch of the word be called scholars, attacked this hapless book virulently, yet even within the past year facts have come to light which go far to confirm those I had written.