larger work. I carried with me an introduction to him from Li-hung-chang the Governor-General of Pei-chil-U, and this note I duly presented to his son, who sent me a reply expressing the deep regret of the family that they should have missed the opportunity of obtaining a portrait. But a general officer subse- quently remarked that after all it was perhaps as well for me that I not arrived in time to take the picture, as most assuredly the speaker himself, and others as well as he, would have accused me of causing the untimely death. It is a wide-spread Chinese belief, from which men of intelligence are by no means free, that in taking a photograph, a certain portion of the vital prin- ciple is extracted from the body of the sitter, and that thus his decease within a limited period is rendered an absolute certainty.
The reader will gather from this that I was frequently looked upon as a forerunner of death, as a sort of Nemesis in fact; and I have seen unfortunates, stricken with superstitious dread, fall down on bended knees and beseech me not to take their likeness or their life with the fatal lens of my camera. But all this might have occurred in our own country not many years ago, where a photograph would have been esteemed a work of the devil.
Tseng-kuo-fan was one of the ^foremost statesmen of his time. He was a member of the Grand Secretariat, and was created a noble of the second class after the expulsion of the rebels from Nanking. He was then at the zenith of his power, and it was even said that his wide-spread influence was dreaded by the court at Peking. In 1868 he became Governor-General of Pei-chil-li, and was removed from that office after the Tientsin massacre, and for the third time appointed Governor-General of the two Kiang.
The view of Nanking was a disappointing one. It is simply
