us at making
inquiries, whatever his talent in the culinary art, for he said he knew
foreigners liked sweet things, and he served us twenty or more courses
of the sweetest food it has been my good fortune to eat!

Our visit proved to be the commencement of a most friendly intercourse.
A few days later the outrider, cart, and retainers were at our door
again, this time escorting the ladies who had come to return the call.
They enjoyed the outing considerably, as is easy to see they would, when
one remembers that they had lived three years in Hwochow and had now
crossed the threshold of their home for the first time during that
period. They could have no intercourse at all with the bourgeoisie of
the town, and apart from visitors staying at the _Yamen_, enjoyed no
social life.

In due course we were invited to an "eight times eight" feast,
consisting of elaborate courses, in which the sweet, the fishy, and the
meaty alternated in bewildering miscellany, whilst our vision was
delighted by the elegant dishes, the lovely coral china, the pure form
of the many-branched candlesticks, and, above all, the graceful, gay
little ladies who manipulated the difficult, slippery food with such a
masterly command of their nimble chop-sticks. Here for the first time I
tasted the delicious birds'-nest soup, gelatinous in consistency and
fishy in taste, being, in fact, a mass compounded of seaweed and small
fish into a nest by a sea-bird.

So far all was well, but we came home faced by the difficulty that it
was now our turn to offer a return feast which must be equally elegant.
There was only one cook in the city who was capable of the preparation
of a suitable repast, and he was in their employ, and though some
surprising things are possible in China, we did not see how we could
secure his services to cook a meal for his own mistress. We were,
therefore, thrown back upon our slender resources, and decided that an
English dinner-party was the only possible solution of the problem. Here
at least we were treading upon familiar ground, and were free from the
snares of Chinese etiquette. We need have no fear of giving offence to
our guests by placing the fish upon the table with its head toward that
quarter which would indicate their position to be of military instead of
civil rank, and many other equally subtle and delicate questions would
now have no terrors for us. We felt it incumbent upon us to do all in
our power to please the eye as