EAST AND WEST.

Otautau Standard and Wallace County Chronicle, Volume VIII, Issue 395, 3 December 1912, Page 2

EAST AND WEST.

Sir Valentine Chirol, at the time of Count Nogi's suicide, wrote to 'The Times' as follows: — Some 15 years ago there were few more interesting figures in the London Corps Diplomatique than the Chmese Minister, Lo Fung Luh. Educated in the West, he had acquired an almost encyclopedic knowledge of Western, and especially of English, literature., He was a fine Shakespeare scholar, and he was as familiar with Chaucer as with Herbert iSpenoer and John Stuart Mill. It -was he who composed for his patron, Li Hung Chang, the remarkable series of speeches which astonished the British public during that statesman's visit to England by their liberal and lofty philosophy. If his practice sometimes fell short of the ideals he admired, the explanation may be found in the bold reply he is said to have made to Li Hung Chang on one occasion when his patron rebuked him : " Your Excellency must not lay the blame for my shortcomings on my Western education, for I had to leave the best of all I learnt in the West outside your Yamen door when I entered your Excellency's service." Lo Fung Luh had a grim sense of humor, which never deserted him until the very end. He succumbed ultimately over here to a painful and well-nigh incurable disease. I had been abroad for some time, and, hearing that he was very ill, I called" upon him as soon as I got home. For I had made his acquaintance in Peking, and had been on very friendly terms with him. I was told at first that he received no one, but I pressed to have my card sent in to him, and was presently taken up to his bedroom. Wnii a cutious whimsical smile on his drawn face he asked me to take a seat and "kindly wait for a few moments until I have done with this gentleman." He was lying on a. low couch, and he pointed to a wizened little Chinaman who was crouching beside him on the ground over a smoking brazier. For about five minutes the Chinese medicine man continued to chant in a shrill nasal voice, whilst from time to time taking up a pinch of ashes from the brazier and sprinkling them over different parts of Lo Fung Luh's body with strange passes and incantations. He thereupon kow-towed three times, and retired. "I thought, my dear friend," Lo Fung Luh then said to me, "it might interest you to see how a Chinaman, steeped in your Western literature, saturated with your Western science and philosophy, dies— a Chinaman!" He was too ill to talk much, and a, few weeks laterjre'iras dead. He had consulted manjfaßyMjdi|p specialists, but I believe he hs|i9HHP^hrunk from carrying out their .^sßß^s^ ■ I shall never forget 'this weird and pitiful scene, enacted in the heart . of London, nor the pathos' and sincerity of the lesson which it was meant to oouyey, ■■.;':.;■%'■■ ■' :..j;r>x\\?,. V