MR. N. A. KONOVALOFF, Commissioner of Customs at Harbin, was not only one of the most charming of men, but his thoughtful kindness and ability were remarkable.

He was, and is indeed, a prince among men.

Mr. Konovaloff having been granted home leave, he took the relieving Commissioner, Mr. Watson, round the district with its many outlying stations to show him how everything worked. I accompanied them on one occasion when they visited the stations on the Sungari and Amur Rivers. The thing that interested me most on this trip was, that when purchasing some shirts and collars at Bladoveschensk on the Amur, all those shown me were of British make !

On arrival at Harbarofsk we and all our fellow-passengers went to the railway station en route to Vladivostock. I had been made paymaster. At the station it was impossible to get near the ticket office, so Konovaloff said, in his quiet voice, "Let us go into the restaurant and have a glass of tea," and when our luggage had been placed near us he told the porter that we required three first-class coupés and two tickets for the Chinese servants. The porter told us how much it would be, and in a few moments he brought the tickets, having got them through the back door of the ticket office, and we each had a coupé to ourselves, while the others disappeared to goodness knows where.

Of course, we may have been the only first-class passengers.

On another occasion, when I happened to be walking along the Siberian coast of the Amur, far away from any town, I went into a small shop at a little village to buy something, and to my surprise saw on a shelf a number of boxes of Huntley and Palmer's biscuits. Knowing what good biscuits were made in Russia, I was naturally surprised, the only answer to the puzzle being that the Huntley and Palmer agents must have been enterprising in having gone so far afield to get customers.

Now that the route from China to Europe via Siberia was no longer through Vladivostock, passengers to and from China changed trains at Harbin, and many of us, when we had the time, went to the station on the off-chance of meeting friends going or coming by the weekly Wagons-Lits express. Once, when I was doing this, I noticed two men that I knew only slightly, so remained some distance away from them. These people were on their way home.



On arriving at Harbin, all passengers are obliged to go to the Wagons-Lits office nearby to exchange their vouchers for tickets. About half-an-hour after the arrival of the train, the passengers commenced to return, and I noticed one of the two men I have just referred to looking very much upset, so I walked up to him saying, "You looked cheerful enough when you arrived, Col. Hall (he was from Hong Kong). What has upset you ? " He said, "I visited Peking on my way here and spent all my money but this" (showing me a 10 dollar note) "and the Wagons-Lits people will not accept the £5 cheques provided for me by Cook's Hong Kong office. I have been to the Russian Asiatic Bank, but that is closed." " Yes," I replied, "To-day is a holiday. Don't worry, anyhow, and as you say that you have no friends on the train, take this 100 rouble note to pay for your food on the train.

You can return it to me from Moscow."

Some two weeks later I received a draft for 105 roubles from Captain Hall. It so happened that I was at the station when he returned. I handed him back the five extra roubles, saying, "You surely don't think that I came here to lend money at 5 per cent., do you ? " and passed it off as a joke. But no doubt he felt that he had done the right thing.

While stopping with Konovaloff, the sister-in-law of an American Commissioner of Customs arrived with a girl friend on their way to Peking. Konovaloff gave a dinner party for them and one of the girls was seated on my left, the other was opposite me, with the English Bishop of Korea, who was an old man, seated next to her. When champagne was passed round, the girl opposite refused it, so I said, "Surely you like cider ?

This is only Russian cider." Both girls took some after that and the Bishop smiled, but did not give me away.

After dinner the party went round to the Portsmouth Club (a Russian club) to see some performance or another, and while there the British Consul, who was one of the party, put up champagne, as is the custom at Harbin, and again the girls refused it until I told them that it was also Russian cider. A year or two later I met one of these girls in Shanghai, and she told me that she had most pleasant recollections of Harbin.

As her sister and brother-in-law were present, I did not refer to the Russian cider !




On returning to Shanghai I found that the Chinese Canton authorities wanted to establish a wireless station on Pratas Reef, which was a submerged atoll some 185 miles to the S.E. of Hong Kong. To describe it more correctly, it was a submerged extinct volcano covered with coral, and with its twelve-mile-wide crater awash at low tide. Pratas Island was a small sandy island on the west side of the reef.

A few years prior to 1910, some Japanese were attracted by the existence of trees on Pratas Island, which consists of nothing but sand, made fertile by the deposit of birds, and as it was discovered that a considerable amount of phosphate lay under the sand, it was assumed that these phosphates would have a large market value. Therefore, some hundreds of Japanese settled on the island to work the phosphates and ship them off to Japan.

It had been the practice of some large Canton junks to lie in the lagoon formed by the reef during the N.E. monsoon, and fish, whilst they were waiting, salting down their catch as they caught them. The crews of these junks had built a Joss House on the island which the Japanese had demolished, so that on their return to Canton they reported the fact to the Canton authorities, who then arranged for the withdrawal of the Japanese from the island. This was done in order to show that Pratas Island was a part of China.

They then proceeded to establish a wireless station and lighthouse on the island with which to mark the dangerous Pratas Reef, on which many vessels had been wrecked.

The promoters of the enterprise which was exploiting the phosphates were very thorough, for they had erected several substantial Japanese wooden houses, and up-to-date condensing plant with a pipe-line from a well in the centre of the island, where the water was less brackish; a large concrete tank to hold the condensed water, a wooden jetty with a line of rails leading to it; and, lastly, several trucks were on the rail for the transport of the phosphates to the jetty. There were also several lighters and a steam-launch to tow the lighters to the steamers engaged in the transport of the phosphates to Japan, the anchorage outside the reef being over two miles away from the jetty.

The Chinese Government wished to establish the wireless station in that particular spot, in order to take barometer readings there and wireless them to the Hong Kong and Ziccawei Observatories during the typhoon season, for the purpose of following the movements of these storms. Pratas Island lies in the path of typhoons approaching Hong Kong.

I was sent to make the survey with a party of officers. There was no fresh water, so we had to use a condenser which I had improvised and taken down with me. There was a fairly thick growth of stumpy trees on the island which had long, thin, willowy branches, very much like mulberry trees, especially as to the shape and size of the leaves.

The scrub is so thick that the branches interlace, and during high winds can be heard in all directions rubbing against each other. There was, therefore, every reason to expect this constant friction of dry twigs to cause spontaneous fire, but no trace of fire could be seen on the island in the form of charred wood.

Notwithstanding this fact, we often saw puffs of smoke during the day and sudden outbursts of flame at night, whenever there was a high wind blowing.

No satisfactory explanation as to how these bursts of flame occurred could be discovered. The Chinese on the island were asked and their answer was, "The Devil caused the fires," which reply satisfied them better than it did the foreign members of the party.

My assistant, Louis Carrel, and I had lived on the island about a month and were in the act of erecting a high mast as a central surveying station, at a time when there was a very strong wind blowing. All the party were busy attending to the work in hand when an outburst of flame occurred in the crutch of a tree, close to where I stood, where some dry leaves had collected between the branches. None of the party had been smoking nor had anyone struck a light, but we discovered that two dry twigs rubbing together in the crutch of the tree had caused the flame. The fire could not spread, because as soon as the leaves caught fire they were rapidly consumed, and the ashes scattered by the wind so effectively that no trace remained. The duration of the flame being so short, the twigs in the neighbourhood had not time to be singed or to show any trace of the occurrence.

The whole thing took place so rapidly that even though I had been on the look-out for such a burst of flame, I was at first inclined to the opinion that my men had caused the fire by dropping a lighted match on the leaves. Small wonder that my Chinese companions, who could not understand the cause of these spontaneous bursts of flame, should have attributed them to a trick of the Evil One.

As I have already said, the presence of trees on this sandy island was accounted for by the large number of sea birds that stopped at the island to lay their eggs, and in due course their deposit produced phosphates and seeds. These in their turn grew up into scrubby trees, which were prevented from growing high by the violence of the storms and the continuous gale blowing during the N.E. monsoon. This monsoon wind always blew hardest fifty miles and over from the coast, and as the current off the coast followed the direction of the wind, it will readily be understood why sailing ships could not beat against the wind to the northward during the N.E. monsoon.

Once I had occasion to go on board a British merchant sailing ship, which was anchored under the shelter of an island off Foochow during the N.E. monsoon.

The captain told me that he had been there for weeks waiting for the monsoon to lull, so that he could go northward; but that as there appeared to be no chance of this, he was going to sail round the south end of the island of Formosa in order to get more favourable winds further out to sea. Look at your map, and you will see the relative positions of Foochow and the south end of Formosa. The north end of that island is nearly opposite to Foochow. You will, therefore, readily understand why, in the old days, the East Indiamen on the clippers and other vessels bound up the coast of China, waited under the lee of Hainan Island for the N.E. monsoon to lull.