At the interesting age of eighteen, an age at which the intellect awakens and old prejudices lose their grasp, he ceased to burn gilt paper on the tombs of his ancestors; he ceased to revere their august spirits; he gave up the use of the planchette, rejected the teachings of Confucius, and, in short, became a convert to Christianity.  This might be considered either as a gratifying testimony to the persuasive powers of Catholic missionaries, or as an example of the wiles of Jesuitism, if we did not know the inner history of Mr. Ling’s soul, the abysmal depths of his personality.  He has not, like many other modern converts, written a little book, such as “How I ceased to chinchin Joss; or, from Confucius to Christianity,” but he has told Madame Judith Mendes all about it.  Madame Mendes has made a name in literature, and English readers may have wondered how the daughter of the poet Theophile Gautier came to acquire the knowledge of Chinese which she has shown in her translations from that language.  It now appears that she was the pupil of Tin-tun-ling, who, in a moment of expansion, confided to her that he adopted the Catholic faith that he might eat a morsel of bread.  He was starving, it seems; he had eaten nothing for eight days, when he threw himself on the charity of the missionaries, and received baptism.  Since Winckelmann turned renegade, and became a Roman Catholic merely that the expenses of his tour to Rome and his maintenance there might be paid, there have surely been few more mercenary converts.  Tin-tun-ling was not satisfied with being christened into the Church, he was also married in Catholic rites, and here his misfortunes fairly began, and he entered on the path which has led him into difficulty and discredit.

The French, as a nation, are not remarkable for their accuracy in the use of foreign proper names, and we have a difficulty in believing that the name of Mr. Ling’s first wife was really Quzia-Tom-Alacer.  There is a touch of M. Hugo’s famous Tom Jim Jack, the British tar, about this designation.  Nevertheless, the facts are that Tin-tun-ling was wedded to Quzia, and had four children by her.  After years of domestic life, on which he is said to look back but rarely and with reluctance, he got a position as secretary and shoeblack and tutor in Chinese to a M. Callery, and left the province of Chin-li for Paris.  For three months this devoted man sent Quzia-Tom-Alacer small sums of money, and after that his kindness became, as Douglas Jerrold said, unremitting.  Quzia heard of her lord no more till she learned that he had forgotten his marriage vow, and was, in fact, Another’s.  As to how Tin-tun-ling contracted a matrimonial alliance in France, the evidence is a little confusing.  It seems certain that after the death of his first employer, Callery, he was in destitution; that M. Theophile Gautier, with his well-known kindness and love of curiosities, took him up, and got him lessons in Chinese, and it seems equally certain that in February,