At the request of the editor of the "North China Daily News" the writer has consented to prepare some papers with a backward look on five Chinese decades. It is not an autobiography, for which most readers would care nothing, much less a history, or even annals, but merely miscellaneous reminiscences with a view to making it easier for new generation of westerners in China to envisage the China to which foreigners came at that time. These notes are simply rough outlines mainly without the aid of newspapers files, old letters, reports, pamphlets or other memcranda which in the vicissitudes of the last quarter of a century have for the most part unfortunarely disappeared.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.