boats, was the customs hulk, where the searching is done,
and where the three officers of the outdoor staff have their offices.
There is at present but little smuggling, because there are no Chinese
officials. Smuggling may be expected to begin in earnest as soon as
Chinese officials are introduced to prevent it. Chinese searchers do
best who use their eyes not to see--best for themselves, that is. The
gunboats guarding this Haikwan Station have a nominal complement of
eighty men, and an actual complement of twenty-four; to avoid, however,
unnecessary explanation, pay is drawn by the commanding officer, not for
the actual twenty-four, but for the nominal eighty.

[Illustration: THE CITY OF CHUNGKING, AS SEEN FROM THE OPPOSITE BANK OF
THE RIVER YANGTSE.]

My two companions in the temple were tidewaiters in the Customs. There
are many storied lives locked away among the tidewaiters in China. Down
the river there is a tidewaiter who was formerly professor of French in
the Imperial University of St. Petersburg; and here in Chungking,
filling the same humble post, is the godson of a marquis and the nephew
of an earl, a brave soldier whose father is a major-general and his
mother an earl's daughter, and who is first cousin to that enlightened
nobleman and legislator the Earl of C. Few men so young have had so many
and varied experiences as this sturdy Briton. He has humped his swag in
Australia, has earned fifteen shillings a day there as a blackleg
protected by police picquets on a New South Wales coal mine. He was at
Harrow under Dr. Butler, and at Corpus Christi, Cambridge. He has been
in the Dublin Fusiliers, and a lieutenant in Weatherby's Horse, enlisted
in the 5th Lancers, and rose from private to staff-sergeant, and ten
months later would have had his commission. He served with distinction
in the Soudan and Zululand, and has three medals with four clasps. He
was present at El Teb, and at the disaster at Tamai, when McNeill's
zareeba was broken. He was at Tel-el-kebir; saw Burnaby go forth to meet
a coveted death at Abu-klea, and was present at Abu-Kru when Sir Herbert
Stewart received his death-wound. He was at Rorke's Drift, and appears
with that heroic band in Miss Elizabeth Thompson's painting. Leaving the
army, C. held for a time a commission in the mounted constabulary of
Madras, and now he is a third class assistant tidewaiter in the Imperial
Maritime Customs of China, with a salary as low as his spirits are hig