two consulates had been built, but roads were non-existent, and the
few houses were separated from one another by a network of paddy
(rice) fields. The new consular assistant shared his house with a man
called Patridge, for whom he had conceived a liking, a jolly fellow
and a capital messmate, yet not without certain peculiarities of his
own. I believe he took a special delight in posing for fearful and
radical ideas like the abolition of the House of Lords, and could
never be made to see why a man should not sit in the presence of his
Sovereign, or wear his hat either if he felt so inclined.

The other youngsters laughed at his notions; one or two even went so
far as to accuse him of being a snob and to twit him on having changed
the spelling of his name and dropped the first "r" for the sake of a
stylishness he pretended to despise. He protested hotly; they stuck
to their assertion. He declared his name was Patridge, always had been
Patridge, and never could be anything else; they disbelieved him, and
so the dispute remained a drawn battle for want of an umpire till
long afterwards, when Robert Hart himself proved the point in a very
curious way.

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