There are no doubt still some who remember the sensal caused at Shanghai and up and down the River by the arrest and trial of C. W. Mason, a Customs assistant of Chinkiang, for importing a cargo of arms for the Ko Lens in September, 1891, and his sub: sequent escape from Shanghai Gaol.
At his trial before Mr. Jamieson, the Consul-General, and the late Si Nicholas Hannen, Mason preserved an_obdurate silence and. pleaded guilty rather than betray his accomplices; and although for many weeks the Shanghai papers advanced exhaustive guesses as to his motives—whether he.was really 2 Ko Lao, whether he was the eatspaw of the Peking Government, whether the Customs were in any way implicated, or whether he was simply a monomaniac—the truth was never revealed.
Now at last, after 30 years, the truth coman to light. Mason himself tells the story. in his "Chinese Confessions of Charles Welsh Mason," which has just been published in London Grant Richards, La, at 7/6 net, and which can be ordered from any
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.