o more noses or eyes than you."

Alas! this home life, delightful though it was, could not last very
long. On August 22nd, 1866, he married that daughter of old Dr. Bredon
of Portadown that his aunt had prophesied he would when, at the age of
ten days, he lay upon her lap. The honeymoon was spent at the romantic
lakes of Killarney, and very soon afterwards the young couple were on
their way out to China again.

The house in Peking had been somewhat rearranged and remodelled while
the I.G. was in Europe, in anticipation of his wife's coming. Without
altering the picturesqueness of the original Chinese design, it had
been adapted to Western ideas of comfort. The pretty pavilions
with their upturned roofs remained; the ornamental rockwork of the
courtyards, the doors shaped like gourds or leaves or full moons,
were left untouched. So were the odd-shaped windows, real Jack Frost
designs; but instead of paper, glass was fitted into the quaint panes
and the stone floors, characteristic of Chinese rooms, covered with
wood--a very necessary alteration in a town which, although in the
same latitude as Naples, Madrid and Constantinople, has a winter as
severe as New York.

Fortunately neither he nor his bride had a very keen taste for
society, as in those days Peking could not boast of any. The
Diplomatic Corps was small; no concession-hunters or would-be builders
of battleships enlivened the capital with their intrigues, and the
monotony of life was broken only by an occasional visitor.

Rarely, very rarely, there was a dinner party--a formal affair, to
which the I.G.'s wife went in state and, as became her rank, in a big
green box of a sedan chair with four bearers. Indeed this was the
only possible means of going about comfortably at night in a city
of unexpected ditches, ruts like sword-gashes, and lighted only by
twinkling lanterns of belated roysterers.

The I.G. was therefore somewhat disconcerted when his chair coolies,
having been six months in his service, came to say they could remain
no longer. "It is not that we are discontented with our wages," the
head man explained, "or that you are not a kind master, or that the
_Taitai_ [the lady of the house] is an inconsiderate mistress."

"Then you have too much work to do?"

"No, that's the trouble," the man replied, "we have not enough. Our
shoulders are getting soft and our leg muscles are getting flabby. Now
if the _Taitai_ would only go out for twenty miles every