ission, spared the lives of himself and his companions and
kept them in prison instead of decapitating them.

But for a long time it was doubtful whether they would ever regain
their liberty, and, as a record for friends who might later search for
them in vain, they made a schoolboy's calendar on the walls of their
cramped and dirty prison, ticked off each day, and signed their names
below. It is nice to know that they got away free at last, though
their fate has little to do with my story.

The record remained. More than twenty years afterwards, when Robert
Hart, then Inspector-General of the Chinese Customs, had occasion to
go to Formosa on business, he found it in an old rice hong (shop), and
Patridge's name among the rest, spelled with two "r's" (Partridge),
whereupon he could not resist the temptation of cutting off the list
with his penknife and, on his return to Shanghai, triumphantly handing
it to his old messmate.

In 1855, owing to a dispute with his Portuguese colleague, the British
Consul at Ningpo was suspended from duty, and young Hart put in charge
of affairs for some months. His calm judgment and good sense during
this first period of responsibility gained him favourable notice with
the "powers that be," for a little later at Canton, when the British
General Van Straubenzee remarked, on introducing him to Mr.(afterwards
Sir Frederick) Bruce, "This young man I recommend you to keep your eye
on; some day he will do something," the latter answered, "Oh, I have
already had my attention called to him by the Foreign Office."

The Portuguese were much in evidence in the Ningpo of those days. They
were numerous; they had power, and they abused it: with the result
that retribution came upon them so sure, so swift, so terrible that
not only Ningpo but the whole of China was deeply stirred by the
horror of it.

I am thinking now of that dreadful massacre of June 26th, 1857,
the culmination of years of trouble between the Cantonese and the
Portuguese lorchamen, who with their fast vessels--the fastest and
most easily managed ships in the age before steam--terrorized the
whole coast, exacted tribute, refused to pay duties, and even fell
into downright piracy, burning peaceful villages and killing their
inhabitants.

Rumours of Cantonese revenge began in the winter of 1856, when news
came that all the foreigners in Ningpo would be massacred on a
certain night. Some one thereupon invited the whole community to d