Yesterday, in the sporting columns, mention was made of a highly circumstantial rumour, which got afoot in Shanghai, proceeded at a brisk pace round the clubs and places where men congregate and was overtaken only by the inevitable assiduity of gentlemen whose task it is to supply newspapers with cabled information on world affairs. Shanghai had to be baulked of a. tale of Scottish prowess on the field of cricket against, the Australians, There are many Scots in Shanghai. Making all allowances however for that fact and for the amiable weakness which, in an argumentative canteen on the Western Front, once led a saturnine Queen's Westminster to put to a Scottish trumpeter of Scottish chivalry the gentle inquiry: "Did the London Scottish really sink the Emden?" the rumour must rank igh. The basis for its author's operations seems to have been 80 exceedingly slender.
It is hardly necessary for anyone in China to be told that skill of this kind is by no means rare. Shanghai itself "has evolved special brand of imaginative art to which the expressive name of "bunders" has been given. Newcomers are told of the favourite sport of a worthy of the past who used to throw out a "bunder" in the early morning among the select circle -of his friends and examine most tenderly and appreciatively the exact dimensions and details of the same "bunder" as it came back to him the same evening. The naked lie of the forenoon had.been clothed by night-time raiment, dazzlingly beautiful and elaborate, but none the less it remained as it began—a lie, That, however, is profestionalism. The amateur rumourmongers are expert enough. There was, only the other day, the. story of the wounding of General Chiang Kai-shek. grew in detail and circumstance. In the and there were folk who knew the very hospital in which the General was being tended. the nature of the wound and the: confronted
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.