A word or two about Patridge’s early history must be told in order to show how he did it.  Patridge, as a young boy, was on board a vessel carrying opium along the coasts of China, when in 1842 she and another engaged in the same trade were wrecked on the island of Formosa, and both crews—­175 Bengalis and 13 white men in all—­were captured by the natives and taken to the capital, Tai-Wan-Foo.  The Bengalis were beheaded immediately.  It was touch and go whether the white men would suffer the same fate, when a brilliant idea struck the ship’s carpenter.  Why not seek to soften the hearts of his captors by a kotow as profound as it was novel; why not stand on his head?  He did, with the happiest results.  The Formosans, delighted with this feat of submission, 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.