Chinese searchers do best who use their eyes not to see--best for themselves, that is.

The gunboats guarding this Haikwan Station have a nominal complement of eighty men, and an actual complement of twenty-four; to avoid, however, unnecessary explanation, pay is drawn by the commanding officer, not for the actual twenty-four, but for the nominal eighty.
[Illustration: THE CITY OF CHUNGKING, AS SEEN FROM THE OPPOSITE BANK OF THE RIVER YANGTSE.] My two companions in the temple were tidewaiters in the Customs.

There are many storied lives locked away among the tidewaiters in China.

Down the river there is a tidewaiter who was formerly professor of French in the Imperial University of St.Petersburg; and here in Chungking, filling the same humble post, is the godson of a marquis and the nephew of an earl, a brave soldier whose father is a major-general and his mother an earl's daughter, and who is first cousin to that enlightened nobleman and legislator the Earl of C.Few men so young have had so many and varied experiences as this sturdy Briton.

He has humped his swag in Australia, has earned fifteen shillings a day there as a blackleg protected by police picquets on a New South Wales coal mine.