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