20
LINDSAY RIDE
But the interest of the cemetery is not by any means confined to biographies of those buried there. There are the histories of the ships that brought them there, clippers, men-of-war, whalers and countrymen (ships engaged in the "country trade", a term usually applied to the trade which had grown up between India, South East Asia and Canton); there are the interesting professions they followed as merchants, missionaries, military men, beach-combers, diplomats or opium traders; there are the mysteries behind the nameless memorial or the undecipherable or partly decipherable inscription, or the absentees. Of these latter we know of at least two, whose sojourns in our cemetery were but temporary; they are Lord Napier, whose final resting place is amongst his shepherds in Ettrick, Scotland, and Thomas T. Forbes, who is with his family in the Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, leaving his companion, who was drowned with him in a typhoon, alone in Macao.
May I conclude my talk this evening by now completing the quotation with which I began?
There are worse ways of occupying leisure than
tours on foot through noteworthy cemeteries,
so long as one does not overstay one's welcome,
and by praying that I have not detained you too long this evening in the restful peace of the Old Protestant Cemetery of Macao.