and he should begin and end each meal
with a teaspoonful of olive oil. So much for the physical side: the
mental is no less important. "I have hung scrolls in my bedroom," Wu
Ting Fang went on to explain, "with these sentences written upon them
in English and in Chinese: 'I am young, I am healthy, I am cheerful.'
Immediately I enter the room my eye falls upon these precepts. I
say to myself, Why, of course I am, and therefore I _am_." Was ever
simpler or saner method discovered for warding off old age?

Towards the end of 1889 the Chinese Government, desirous of paying the
I.G. a special compliment, chose to confer upon him an honour never
before given to any foreigner. Without precedent and without warning,
the Emperor issued an Imperial Decree raising him to the Chinese
equivalent of the peerage. Henceforth he belonged to the distinguished
company of Iron Hatted Dukes--at least not he but his ancestors
did, for this was no ordinary father-to-son patent of nobility. The
topsy-turvy honour reached backward instead of forward, diminishing
one rank with each succeeding generation.

The Chinese reason as follows: "If a man is wise or great or
successful, it is because his forbears were studious or temperate or
frugal. Therefore, when we give rewards, shall we not give them where
they are justly due?" Something might be said for a point of view
so diametrically opposed to our own, but the question of ethics has
nothing to do with my story.

The strange feature of it is that the very night before the Edict
appeared--when the I.G. had not the slightest hint of what was in
store for him--he dreamed of his father's father--a thing he had not
done for years. Dressed in a snuff-coloured suit, with knee-breeches
and shining shoe buckles, he appeared walking down the little street
of Portadown leaning heavily upon a blackthorn stick and murmuring
sadly, "Nobody cares for me, nobody takes any notice of me." Nobody,
indeed?

[Illustration: SIR ROBERT HART'S STABLES IN 1890.]

The very next evening at a dinner party at the French Legation some
one told the I.G. of the new honour, gazetted an hour before, and how
an Emperor, with a stroke of his Vermilion Pencil, had deprived the
ghost of a grievance.

Equally romantic was a coincidence that happened when the I.G. was
made a Baronet in 1893. The question of arms then coming up, he made
all possible enquiries concerning those which his family had a right
to use. Without doubt t