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wondered how much of that soft musical quality was due to him and how much inherent in that unknown tongue.
William Hunter wrote two books on his China days, Bits of Old China published in 1855, and The Fan Kwai at Canton, in 1882. Both contain valuable and interesting information on the relationship between Chinese and foreign traders at Canton in the first half of the 19th century.
W. C. Hunter was married twice. His first wife was of a Virginia family noted for its high-spirited and beautiful girls, or at least this is the impression drawn from remarks made by Lieutenant (later Rear-Admiral) G. H. Preble. Preble was a frequent guest of the Hunter family at Canton. One sister, Preble states, gained notoriety by eloping, which so devastated a former lover that he committed suicide. Another sister also eloped but with less tragic consequences.
Preble in repeating this gossip said that Mrs. Hunter was “quite a different person” from her sisters, and though she had had five or six children by the time he had met her "no one would have guessed it." After her death, her husband married an American woman in Paris in 1876.
The homesick American lieutenant enjoyed his visits in the Hunter home and wrote to his wife about them. In 1854 he mentioned the international gastronomic delicacies he enjoyed at one of their small dinner parties—shark's fin soup, and beche de mer stew, fresh pineapple, baked mango tarts and English Yarmouth bloaters.
On another evening he was much impressed with the new-fangled stereopticon kept in the Hunter's parlour for the amusement of their guests. He described it to his wife as "a couple of daguerreotypes fitted or mounted with a stereoscope attachment so that seen through it only one image was shown, and every part stood out with the fulness of a statue, and the perfection of life petrified."
During the 1840s and 1850s Hunter divided his time between