a Taotai being considered of too low a rank for such
an honor. As soon as we arrived, Yuan Shih Kai, who was then Viceroy of
Chihli Province at Tientsin, sent an official to my father to prepare
the time and place for this function, which is an extremely pretty
one. When arrangements had been made, both my father and Yuan Shih Kai
dressed in their full ceremonial robes, which is the dragon long robe,
with a reddish black three-quarter length coat over it, chao chu (amber
beads), hat with peacock feather and red coral button, and repaired at
once to the Wan Shou Kung (10,000 years palace), which is especially
built for functions of this kind, where they were met by a large number
of officials of the lower grades. At the back centre of this Temple, or
Palace, stands a very long narrow table on which are placed the tablets
of the Emperor and Empress Dowager, on which is written, "Wan sway, wan
sway, wan wan sway" (10,000 years times 10,000 years times 10,000
10,000 years). The Viceroy, or in this case Yuan Shih Kai, and the other
officials arrived first. Yuan stood at the left side of this table and
the others arranged themselves in two diminishing lines starting from
the front corners of the table. Soon afterward my father came and knelt
directly in front of the centre of the table and said, "Ah ha Ching
Sheng An" (Your servant gives you greeting). After this ceremony was
over my father immediately arose and inquired after Their Majesties'
health, and Yuan replied that they were quite well. This closed the
function.

We stayed in Tientsin for three days, arriving in Peking on the
twenty-ninth. My father's condition was much worse and he begged for
four months' leave of absence, in which to recuperate, which was granted
by Her Majesty, the Empress Dowager. As our beautiful mansion, which we
had built and furnished just before leaving for Paris, was burned during
the Boxer Rising of 1900, entailing a loss of over taels 100,000, we
rented and moved into a Chinese house. Our old house was not entirely
new. When we bought the place there was a very fine but old Chinese
house, the palace of a Duke, standing on the ground, and by some clever
re-arrangement and building on, it was transformed into a beautiful
foreign style house with all the fine hardwood carving of the old house
worked into it. By using the words "foreign style," it is meant that, in
so far as the Chinese house could be made to look like a foreign house,
withou