He handed Ah Lum's letter to the Frenchman. Brin read it carefully, and with much gravity. It was as follows:—
From my camp above Tu-men-tzü,
First Sunday after Trinity.
Honoured Sir,
A man's manners, says the Sage T'ai Ping-fu, are to be measured by his intentions. If therefore your servant, greatly deploring his ignorance of your honourable language, write through another hand, I pray you will not charge him with want of courtesy; does not the poet say "Respect is the corner-stone of friendship"? Nor will you, honoured sir, be other than indulgent if this letter should seem to have been unduly delayed in the writing. Even as a pearl is not to be found in every oyster, so is it rare among our literati to meet a scholar learned in the barbaric tongues. Such a one I have now discovered in the writer of this letter, Mr. Chang Fu-sing, whose late return from the august University at Oxford was duly reported by my agents at Ma-en-ho-kai. [Lincoln College: 3rd class Mods., aegrotat Mod. Hist. Chang Fu-sing, B.A. Oxon.] Him I secured by night for the trifling loss of five men. [My nose abraded; one eye bunged up. Ch. F.-s., B.A.Oxon.] Trifling, for rarity—and the need of the purchaser—are the true measures of value. To the starving man a crust outweighs a viceroy's ransom.
Since the auspicious day when your honour's never-to-be-forgotten assistance enabled our troops to reach the shelter of these mountains, the insolent Russians—may their graves be defiled!—[Idiom="Ruin seize thee!" Cf. Gray, "The Bard", i. 1. Ch. F.-s., B.A. Oxon.]—have not dared to molest your unworthy servant. For, as the ineffable T'ai Ping-fu says, the bird that has once escaped the net is hard indeed to snare. But, again, as Wang Wei reminds us to our profit in his Essay on Military Matters, small reverses, by inspiring caution, may benefit an army, even as small successes may lead through saucy confidence to humiliation. After a little affair otherwise unworthy of your august attention, the two prisoners, Bekovitch and Sowinski, were found to have absented themselves from our custody. As the proverb goes, Only a fool expects courtesy from a hog.
Yet, as Li T'ai-poh harmoniously says:
When stings the Bee, and Pain is keen, then shouldst thou
think of Honey;
Wise Men seek Good in every Ill, yea, e'en in Loss of Money.
[The versification is mine. Competitor: Newdigate Verse. Ch. F.-s., B.A. Oxon.] After consulting the works of Tu Fu, I found that, the sunshine of your honour's presence being withdrawn, it was allowable to return to our ancestral usages in matters relating to the treatment of prisoners and criminals. If in this my judgment was in error, I must beg your honour's clemency; for are we not taught by P'an T'ang-shên that in defending a friend from calumny all measures are laudable? It may suffice to say that some days before his escape, the Pole, kneeling on hot chains, was induced to confess his crimes; these were duly inscribed by him in the Russian tongue and signed. Thereafter his partner in guilt, who had shown more obduracy, even resisting our most approved means of persuasion, acknowledged his many wickednesses, among them the preparation of forged papers secretly introduced by a menial into the writing-cabinet of your honour's august father. True is it, as the Sage says, "Fear rather a faithless servant within the gates than a hundred enemies without", or, as the more homely proverb warns us, A worm at the root will bring the noblest oak to earth.
But calamity treads hard upon the heels of the wicked. Witness the fate of the Russian—may his posterity be cut off! [Idiom="A murrain on thee!" Cf. Shakespeare, "The Tempest", iii. 2. 88. Ch. F.-s., B.A. Oxon.] By sure hands your unworthy servant brought his confession beneath the eyes of the barbarian commander-in-chief. He is blind indeed who cannot see the length of his nose. My agents now inform me that the evil-doer is stripped of his offices, and of the emoluments thereto pertaining; as our saying goes, he has lost his buttons. His fellow-criminal has evaded my most diligent enquiries. But him also Justice pursues with sharpened sword, resting not by night neither by day.