a very analogous function. Where and what the word comes
from I do not know, but its meaning in the Far East is universally
understood to be a bachelor entertainment consisting of an enormous
dinner with plenty of wine, tales, songs and general hilarity,
occasionally verging on riotousness with breakage of household
furniture and other effects.

As I glance back over the past fifteen years such wild nights stand
out like beacons in pleasing relief from the many respectable
gatherings, be it in Church or Society, at which I have had the honour
of assisting, but which have left no impressions sufficiently vivid to
class them with treasured souvenirs or even provoke a smile.

Some years since there visited Hankow a personage of exalted rank,
who, being a near kinsman of one of the most powerful of Europe's
present rulers, was received with patriotic enthusiasm by the large
colony of his nationals domiciled there, and with every mark of
respect by all other members of the cosmopolitan community.

His arrival in one of the fine Chinese river-boats was signalised by
what might have been a fatal catastrophe but for the skilful
manoeuvring of his ship by the veteran American skipper.

Just as the vessel had threaded her way through numerous ocean
steamers and foreign gun-boats anchored in the stream, and was slowly
approaching the hulk alongside which she was to be made fast, an
enormous raft of timber, bearing a whole village of huts and a
considerable population of raft navigators, caught by the swirling
eddy caused by a freshet from the River Han, which 200 yards above
this point was pouring at right angles into the mighty Yangtse's
five-knot current, bore swiftly down on the steamer, threatening to
strike her amidships and either pin her to the hulk or crush her
against the stone-faced bund, when she must have been immediately
sunk. Unaware of the danger until it was almost upon him, the captain
had just time to reverse his engines, and by going full speed astern
with the helm hard over bring his ship round so as to receive the
threatened blow end on instead of abeam. The impact nearly drove the
vessel's stern into the hulk, but with her engines now going full
speed ahead, and churning up two white lanes of foam with her
paddle-wheels, she rammed her bows into the raft, and just managing to
deflect its course they floated down with the stream locked together,
until by a miracle they had passed clear of all the shipping,