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 spade with which the doctor dug up our little baby brother or sister from out of the parsley-bed—when story-books had that astonishing hold on me that, out of our town, I perfectly established the field along which Christian ran with his fingers in his ears when his neighbours tried to call him back. (And if ever there was a case for the parochial authorities of a man deserting his wife and children, Christian's was one.) In this happy time I had associations with China, and they now come back from one of the most charming of the attractive stories in the Arabian Nights Entertainments. I was now looking—practically, with my own eyes—on a Chinese town, and a group of idle boys playing. A grave stranger of a foreign and travelled aspect was watching them. I should not have been at all surprised if he had recognized, in one of the urchins, the son of his dead brother—had clothed him at a ready-made tailor's, and then introduced him, by lifting up a stone with a ring in it, to those wonderful nursery grounds of Hunt and Roskill, and Phillips, and Garrard, where the dew was all diamonds, and the wall-fruit all stones. And was it not likely that, in this very street, the stranger might have subsequently passed when anxious to exchange his new moderator lamps for any old argands, or solars, or camphines that might be dust-collecting about the house? Here again was an open space of ground, on which that palace might have stood, which went away one night in such a hurry. And strange to say, there was a palace here, and it did disappear one early January morning. It belonged to that old miscreant Yeh, and its sudden absence was owing rather to the sponging of practical guns than the rubbing of wonderful lamps. And although I heard nothing, both here and at Hong Kong, but of Hall of the Calcutta, and Mr. Oliphant; Telesio's pale ale "chop" (or boat store); John Dent's French cook's chow-chow; the arrival of the Fei-man steamer; Colonel Stevenson's bamboo balcony on the hill: the 59th; Sir John Bowring and Mr. Chisholm Anstey: and innumerable "shaves:" yet my thoughts ran upon Confucius and pagodas, nodding mandarins, chop-sticks, and the feast of lanterns, and above all, on Aladdin.

I was to join Mr. Parkes at the yamun of the Allied Commissioners, and go with him to pay a visit to Peh-kwei, the Governor of Canton. This yamun had been the palace of the Tartar general, but was now filled with English and French officials, soldiers, marines, compradors, coolies, and Chinese rabble, attending the police cases. We here formed a small procession, and our revolvers came into show; for Mr. Parkes was the most unpopular man in the city with the Cantonese. They called him "the red-bristled barbarian," and had let fly various jingals at him, at different times, in the streets. But he had the courage of theanybody you please; and the more they annoyed him, the more he would ride them down, and bang them back into their ambuscades. We were all on ponies or in chairs, with the exception of our guards; and we rode so fast along the narrow streets, and through the bustling crowds of passengers, and almost over the wares displayed out of doors, that a fire-engine going through the Lowther Arcade in a hurry could not have