'Looks uncommon like it,' says the major with a sigh of relief.
A medical gentleman at one time resident in China furnishes the following notes of interesting incidents within his knowledge. Though roughly put together, they may amuse our readers and be relied on as true.
In the month of January 1869, at about half-past seven P.M., I was sitting at dinner in my house in Swatow, when a sailor from the small gun-boat at that time in Swatow Harbour came running breathless and hatless, asking me to come down without any delay to the hospital, which I had built in the Chinese town on the side of the river opposite my own house. This man said there were thirteen sailors and the captain of the gun-boat badly wounded by an unprovoked attack of the Chinese. This looked serious indeed; so putting up instruments, lint, &c. I hastened down with the sailor. On reaching the hospital, the unwounded men of the gun-boat were still carrying into the hospital their injured comrades. I never saw a set of men so severely wounded without any being fatally so. I set to work, and extracted fifteen bullets from the men; but some were too deeply imbedded to get at that night. One man had one ear shot off, a second two fingers, a third was hit in the eye, a fourth shot in the breast, and I afterwards extracted the bullet at his back. The captain of the gun-boat had on a very thick shaggy pilot-coat, double on the breast; a bullet had cut right across his chest; and on examination I found the skin just raised where it had passed. A very singular wound was that of a young officer, whose two front teeth were knocked in by a bullet, that then disappeared somewhere in his palate. I never could find this bullet whilst he was under my care; but it seemed not to have done him much harm. He left Swatow; and I saw him three or four years later, and he said the lead had never appeared, and he had suffered no inconvenience from it. I believe it must have worked itself somewhere into the muscles at the back of his neck.
The cause of this raid of the Chinese was this: the captain of the gun-boat had merely taken out twenty-five men to exercise by rowing one of his boats up the river Han, on which Swatow is situated. This river is very wide at the mouth, and abounds in large creeks; on the banks of one of the largest of these, next to Swatow, are built three fortified walled-in villages, or what we should call _towns_, from their large population. The inhabitants of these towns were well known as being particularly lawless, not having paid taxes for many years, and setting the mandarins at defiance. Seeing the foreigners (whom they detest) rowing up the creek, 'the Braves' (as they call themselves) rushed out in hundreds and fired into the gun-boat from each side of the river; and were it not for the nature of their guns, or as the Chinese call them 'gingals,' which are old-fashioned and of short range, none of the boat's crew would have returned alive; as it was, fourteen men were well riddled; and the boat, which I saw afterwards, had as many holes in it as a colander. The sailors rowed away for their lives, and escaped.