[241] The commentator would have us believe that Mr. Lin’s fondness for wine was to him an element of health and happiness rather than a disease to be cured, and that the priest was wrong in meddling with the natural bent of his constitution.
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[242] In an entry on torture (see No. LXXIII., [note 62]), which occurs in my Glossary of Reference, I made the following statement:—“The real tortures of a Chinese prison are the filthy dens in which the unfortunate victims are confined, the stench in which they have to draw breath, the fetters and manacles by which they are secured, the absolute insufficiency even of the disgusting rations doled out to them, and above all the mental agony which must ensue in a country with no Habeas corpus to protect the lives and fortunes of its citizens.”
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[243] For a small bribe, the soldiers at the gates of a Chinese city will usually pass people in and out by means of a ladder placed against the wall at some convenient spot.
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[244] I believe it is with us only a recently determined fact that dogs perspire through the skin.
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[245] The exact date is given,—the 17th of the 6th moon, which would probably fall towards the end of June.
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[246] See No. XCVIII., [note 159].
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[247] This corresponds to our ceremony of laying the foundation stone, except that one commemorates the beginning, the other the completion, of a new building.
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[248] That is, the disembodied spirit of the oilman.
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[249] A most abstruse and complicated game of skill, for which the Chinese claim an antiquity of four thousand years, and which I was the first to introduce to a European public through an article in Temple Bar Magazine for January, 1877. Apropos of which, an accomplished American lady, Miss A. M. Fielde, of Swatow, wrote as follows:—“The game seems to me the peer of chess.... It is a game for the slow, persistent, astute, multitudinous Chinese; while chess, by the picturesque appearance of the board, the variety and prominent individuality of the men, and the erratic combination of the attack,—is for the Anglo-Saxon.”
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[250] On this day, annually dedicated to kite-flying, picnics, and good cheer, everybody tries to get up to as great an elevation as possible, in the hope, as some say, of thereby prolonging life. It was this day—4th October, 1878—which was fixed for the total extermination of foreigners in Foochow.
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