There was a full attendance of the C.E.M.8. on the Ist instant hear Sir Havilland de Sausmarez's excellent paper on the position British subjects in China, The paper was followed with close attention and members have now a much clearer conception of factories, orders in Council, judicial functions of Consuls, the object. of registration, and many other things pertaining to the extraordinary word extraterritoriality.
The service list for December has just been published and we are glad to notice that on Christmas Day the Messiah Christmas music, including the chorus For unto us," is to be sung.
The tombstone which has recently been built into the wall of the Cathedral to the North of the main entrance has a somewhat strange history attached to it. The Hon. Colonel Charles Catheart—a young man of only 29 years of age—was appointed British Ambassador to China and sailed from England in the Vestal, frigate. He was consumptive when he left England and died in 1793 in the Straits of Banca and was taken back to Anjar in Java and there buried in a fort.
The companions of his voyage erect-wooden monument to his memory, and a drawing of this monument is to be found in Sir John Barrow's 'A Voyage to Cochin China in 1792-3.""
Inquiries in Java as to whether the wooden tablet was still in existence, disclosed the fact that the old fortress at Anjar had been des-royed by the eruption of Mount Krakatan in 1883 and after the eruption some stones were found in the rice fields close by and had been removed to a kind of shed in the European Cemetery at Anjer. One of these stones was found to be Colonel Catheart's. The matter was brought to the notice of the present Earl Cathcart who gave permission for it to be brought to Shanghai and erected in the Cathedral. The stone, which is of dark slate 6-ft. 6-in. by 3-ft. bears the arms of the Catheart family and a Latin inscription setting forth the good qualities of the Ambassador.
Lord Catheart's records show that when the telegraph cable from Anjar to Sumatra was being laid in 1871, the Ambas: remains were found a considerable distance below the surface, but be has no information as to when the stone was substituted for the wooden Several names and initials clear that it must have been erected in the very early nineteenth century. With the death of Colonel Cathcart the Embassy came to an lend as no one had been appointed to succeed him in his office in the event of his death. The subsequent Embassy under Lord Macartney left England in September 1793.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.