He guessed well enough what brought the people, and would sometimes remark laughingly, “They come; I know why they all come.  It is just to get a sight of the two curios of Peking, the I.G. and his queer musicians.”

Occasionally Chinese guests would mingle with the rest, lending with their silken gowns and silken manners a touch of picturesqueness to the scene.  I can well remember seeing the famous Wu Ting Fang, whose alert manner made him a general favourite.  He prided himself upon it—­and rightly.  “How old do you think I am?” he asked his host one day.  “Perhaps forty-five,” was the reply.  “Forty-five!  What a guess!  Sixty-five would have been nearer—­and I mean to live to be two hundred.”

He went on to explain carefully how this feat was to be accomplished.  The first thing, naturally, was diet.  The man who would cheat time should live on nuts like the squirrels (do they contrive to do it, I wonder?).  Under no conditions should he touch salt, lest a dangerous precipitate form upon his bones, 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?