have done without their kindness and assistance. I found the Commodore sitting on a raised platform above the deck, and after we had talked about our doings, boiled some of our eggs, and smoked a cigar, we lay down to sleep on the bridge. Early in the morning I went on shore, and found a long tent with the Commodore's things at one end, and then the officers' and the men's at the other end. As there was work to be done on board, the Commander gave the men some biscuit, took them away, and left me with a party to put things in order. He had not been gone ten minutes when a deluge of rain came down, filled a pond which received the drain of a ravine, and made it overflow its banks till the water burst through the whole length of the tent, and nearly carried it all away. My party rushed out and dammed the course of the torrent, tried to open a new course for it through the sand, and saved the brass guns from being either carried off or buried in the sand.

"The rain lasted all day, but not so violently as at first, and we made a new tent, which pleased me so much that I at once put half the men into it when they came on shore again. On Friday the Nankin and Inflexible came to us, and on Saturday we sent 300 of our men to live on board the former. Captain Corbett very kindly sent me a sheep. On Sunday the old hulk 'Alligator' came down, and we officers came to live on board her.”

In May, Goodenough was given the command of a small hired steamer, the "Honkong," with two large and four small guns, and took command of her just before the battle of Fatshan, which he describes in the following letter:

"I took command of this craft, the hired steamer Honkong, on Saturday morning, the 30th May. All Sunday I was running up and down the river on various duties, and on Monday, at halfpast four in the morning, weighed to go into action, to take some junks anchored in the Fatshan Creek, a branch of this river.

The junks were protected by a hill fort, and this was first stormed by Captain Elliot after a small resistance. We then advanced on the junks with four other gunboats, towing all the boats of the squadron, silenced a four-gun battery on our way, and were just within range when we got on shore. Can you conceive anything more disappointing? The Commodore, who had his pendant in me, jumped into his boat, and away went all the boats to the attack. The other gunboats passed me, and I felt thoroughly sold. Nothing was to be done but to get off, and then to follow the boats, which, after leaving a division to destroy the taken junks, passed on to chase the Chinese flying in their boats. All the other gunboats had got on shore not long after passing me, and I passed them one by one; but after a couple of miles got on shore again, and had just hauled my vessel off, when I saw firing ahead. I called out to cut our hawser. Young Harry Stephenson seized a cutlass and cut it through, and we went on again, and soon found the boats retiring from a strong force of twenty picked junks moored across a narrow part of the stream. The boats had pulled on after the capture of the first body of junks, and ignorant of the existence of these twenty, in front of whom three or four light leading boats suddenly found themselves at a turn of the river. A heavy fire began directly our boats checked their speed. The heavy boats with guns came up, but either touched a bank or were carried by the current against those already on it, and a sad loss followed. Major Kearney, a volunteer, Deputy Quartermaster-General of the Army, was almost the first killed by a round 18-pounder full in the breast, as he sat by the side of Captain Leckie, in the Fury's gig. A round shot struck the Commodore's galley, and she began to fill. He stepped on the thwart to keep dry till another boat came up, and another shot passed under his feet and went through the bottom of the boat. Victor was with him, binding the stump of a fine young Isle of Wight man's arm. Another man had both his legs taken off, and two others were wounded as she sank from under them. The Commodore called out to save his pendant, and stepped into

Captain Turnour's cutter, shaking his fist at the junks, promising to pay them out for this in the afternoon. Graham, close to me in the pinnace, had his jacket riddled by grape, and his legs blackened by the wind of a round shot. Two men's heads were taken off by his side, and the blood from their poor trunks literally covered him; three or four others were wounded in his boat, and the Commodore was persuaded to retire and re-form. Just then we came up, and opened fire from our bow gun. The boats gave us some of their wounded, which filled our mess-room and cabins, and then dropped astern to re-form. The Commodore would not allow me to advance any farther, and we had the disadvantage of engaging at a distance all these fellows, who knew their range accurately, and dropped some shot on board, taking off one poor fellow's leg, and wounding another badly. After half an hour's firing the junks began to retreat, and we followed. The boats came up again, and gave the Commodore a cheer, and off he dashed. The river got shallower, and we got a little beyond where the junks had lain, and found it impossible to get any further. We drew seven feet, and there was nowhere more than six. Some more junks in a small branch creek opened fire at us, seeing our mast-heads over the trees, and in about ten minutes we drove them out, and tried again to get afloat. We could see the Commodore taking and destroying junks as he went up, some in the very suburb of the city of Fatshan, which stands in the same relation that Manchester does to Liverpool, and has always been a shut book to Europeans. We recovered the Commodore's boat, which had floated up with the stream, and as soon as we could we got down the river again to where the first junks were destroyed.

"I had received many more wounded, nearly all very badly so, and so I was ordered to take them straight to Hong Kong at once, and passed a horrid night on the bridge. Put the sick on board the hospital ship at seven in the morning; coaled, watered, and started again at six in the evening, passed another night on the bridge, piloting the ship, and reported myself to the Admiral at

nine o'clock the next morning. I never was so dead beat in all my life. All the way down I had the ringing of shot in my ears, and the groans of a poor fellow with half his skull fractured and carried away, who could not be removed; and coming up we had two alarms of springing a leak, and I had actually steered for a sandy place to put the ship on shore; the first from the injection pipe of the engine bursting, and the second from the speed and immersion causing a shot to work out of a hole which it had before stopped for itself."

Beauty of scenery always had a great charm for him, and he took pleasure in finding out what it was that pleased him in a landscape. About this time he thus speaks of his first impressions of China, as compared to what some of his family were enjoying while travelling in Italy and Spain :—

"How I envy any one even of your fellow-travellers in Italy, and how I could enjoy it with you. Long before I get home again it will all be over, I am afraid, unless I would whisk myself overland to join you. The scenes and climate, and, above all, the associations, must be delightful. This country is totally wanting in the last. There are no scenes one remembers with interest, no people who have spirited, free, or gentle natures to give one an interêt de cœur. The little one knows of the past history here excites no interest or reverence. The impressions of the character of the Cantonese, received on the spot, accord completely with the ideas imbibed from reading Huc. Some parts of the river are excessively pretty now. The rice plants have grown up to a height of four feet or more, and are therefore never covered by the tide, and they appear to keep the same brilliant green until cut. Junks of all sorts move about with their round-headed dark brown sails of matting, following the windings of some creek, till they disappear or lower their sails behind a mass of wide-spreading, dark-leaved trees, which the

village people sit under in front of the waterside. Still in the tropics one can never say that any part of scenery like this is absolutely beautiful; for where light and atmosphere vary so immensely with the time of day, what is dull at mid-day if it is cloudy, or all of one colour if the sun shines, is full of tender shades and pretty minute changes at early morning or sunset.

"I had your note from Madrid. I can quite understand your not liking it after your visits to quieter places. I think that to like a large town one ought to know many people intimately in it, and have some one, at least, whose countenance changes for you. In the country one is content with the scene and sky which change for no one, but are always full of beauty and grace, for those who love them.

"I have seen a man who has travelled through the heart of the central provinces of China, going from Canton to Hankow. He says that there were no traces of rebels there, but that all was. quiet-this is satisfactory. The country he describes is pretty and varied, but never gets beyond the petitesse of the willow pattern. Does not this account to you for their cramped, dwarfed style of art. They have nothing that is really stupendous or magnificent to set off against the work of their own hands -dykes and canals-which are stupendous as works of human labour, and in their intense self-love they prefer to pourtray the quaint, grotesque weavings of their own fancies to copying the beauties of nature, or rather of God's hand. They don't perceive or admire the lovely changes of the hues of clouds or sky any more than they can the harmony of music. Sharp contrasts of brilliant colours please them best, and in the latter they cannot go astray with all the carpets of brilliant flowers which the central provinces possess."

In the same letter he gives an account of taking some war junks, with regard to which action he was mentioned in a despatch of Sir R. McClure's :