easureless miseries of life. For the wholly insignificant sum of
thirty dollars I had purchased information and disgust more than I
required, and the right to look after a woman half crazed with drink and
fear the third part of a terrible night. Mine was the greater sin.

When we stepped back into the world I was glad that the fog stood
between myself and the heaven above.

No. IX

SOME TALK WITH A TAIPAN AND A GENERAL; PROVES IN WHAT MANNER A SEA
PICNIC MAY BE A SUCCESS.

"I should like to rise and go
Where the golden apples grow,
Where beneath another sky
Parrot-islands anchored lie."

--_R. L. Stevenson._

Hong-Kong was so much alive, so built, so lighted, and so bloatedly rich
to all outward appearance that I wanted to know how these things came
about. You can't lavish granite by the cubic ton for nothing, or rivet
your cliffs with Portland cement, or build a five-mile bund, or
establish a club like a small palace. I sought a _Taipan_, which means
the head of an English trading firm. He was the biggest _Taipan_ on the
island, and quite the nicest. He owned ships and wharves and houses and
mines and a hundred other things. To him said I:--

"O _Taipan_, I am a poor person from Calcutta, and the liveliness of
your place astounds me. How is it that every one smells of money; whence
come your municipal improvements; and why are the White Men so
restless?"

Said the _Taipan_: "It is because the island is going ahead mightily.
Because everything pays. Observe this share-list."

He took me down a list of thirty or less companies--steam-launch
companies, mining, rope-weaving, dock, trading, agency and general
companies--and with five exceptions all the shares were at premium--some
a hundred, some five hundred, and others only fifty.

"It is not a boom," said the _Taipan_. "It is genuine. Nearly every man
you meet in these parts is a broker, and he floats companies."

I looked out of the window and beheld how companies were floated. Three
men with their hats on the back of their heads converse for ten minutes.
To these enters a fourth with a pocket-book. Then all four dive into the
Hong-Kong Hotel for material wherewith to float themselves and--there is
your company!

"From these things," said the _Taipan_, "comes the wealth of Hong-Kong.
Every notion here pays, from the dairy-farm upwards. We have passed
through our bad times and come to the fat years."

He told me tales of the