ingly absent-minded in "In Search of the Castaways" Passepartout the irresponsible in "Round the World." But Servadac, while he retains his Gallic lightness, is keen and strong and resolute, a true leader of men. As for the Germans, they had figured before only in the extravagant but not ill-natured picture of the professor in "The Center of the Earth." Now, in "Off on a Comet" Verne suddenly depicts with a bitterness new to him the ugliest character he had yet drawn, the trader Hakkabut, "a Jew and a German." Then, in his professor Schultz of "The Five Hundred Millions of the Begum" he outdoes himself in the savage, sneering, impossible picture of the utterly vulgar, selfish, insensate, dull, and yet iron-willed and powerful Schultz. Nevertheless his hideously ugly and unhuman figure undeniably remains grotesquely and suggestively German. It is a masterly piece of satire. It is race antagonism run riot.
From this grim tale it is a relief to turn to the whimsical fantasy, " The Tribulations of a Chinaman in China," issued in the same year. This is assuredly one of Verne's most charming though lightest books. From the philosophical opening conversation on the value of life, it slips easily into the peculiarly topsy-turvy Chinese idea of employing your best friend to slay you secretly. Then comes the mad chase across all China, the pursuing victim resolutely hunting down the reluctant ex-rebel and incompetent assassin, while, the victim's two comic guards against himself cling ever at his elbow.
The geographical pictures of China are finished and perfect as all the master's work of this description. The only scientific touch in the whole, the sea-trip in the rubber suits, is not so serious as to be out of keeping with the light-hearted whimsical spirit of the entire tale.
In "The Giant Raft," Verne started another of those two volumed, double named stories which he had at first preferred. Only the first book " Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon" appears in the present volume. The other "The Cryptogram " follows in volume twelve.
