es and cutlasses, so that
she might destroy it when found, and with stinkpots at her mastheads
and boarding-nets hung round her. Of course he was to escape in the
end, but so narrowly that all possible sail had to be crowded on to
his little ship, and the whole crew set to work the big oar at the
stern, while every soul on board shivered and shook as men should when
pirates are after them.

Ningpo itself in 1854 was the quietest place under the sun. A handful
of merchants lived there, buried without the trouble of dying; one or
two consulates had been built, but roads were non-existent, and the
few houses were separated from one another by a network of paddy
(rice) fields. The new consular assistant shared his house with a man
called Patridge, for whom he had conceived a liking, a jolly fellow
and a capital messmate, yet not without certain peculiarities of his
own. I believe he took a special delight in posing for fearful and
radical ideas like the abolition of the House of Lords, and could
never be made to see why a man should not sit in the presence of his
Sovereign, or wear his hat either if he felt so inclined.

The other youngsters laughed at his notions; one or two even went so
far as to accuse him of being a snob and to twit him on having changed
the spelling of his name and dropped the first "r" for the sake of a
stylishness he pretended to despise. He protested hotly; they stuck
to their assertion. He declared his name was Patridge, always had been
Patridge, and never could be anything else; they disbelieved him, and
so the dispute remained a drawn battle for want of an umpire till
long afterwards, when Robert Hart himself proved the point in a very
curious way.

A word or two about Patridge's early history must be told in order to
show how he did it. Patridge, as a young boy, was on board a vessel
carrying opium along the coasts of China, when in 1842 she and another
engaged in the same trade were wrecked on the island of Formosa, and
both crews--175 Bengalis and 13 white men in all--were captured by
the natives and taken to the capital, Tai-Wan-Foo. The Bengalis were
beheaded immediately. It was touch and go whether the white men
would suffer the same fate, when a brilliant idea struck the ship's
carpenter. Why not seek to soften the hearts of his captors by a
_kotow_ as profound as it was novel; why not stand on his head? He
did, with the happiest results. The Formosans, delighted with this
feat of subm