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than what is provided in these three letters. In later life he rarely wrote about his experience at St. Paul's or his life during his Hong Kong years. Fryer's letters, other than these three, and diaries from this period, if they survive, have not been located. However, in these three polished letters we can see a progression from impressionable college graduate, to responsible and presumably successful superintendent of a CMS sponsored college, to socially accepted compatriot, all the while improving his mastery of the Chinese language. He wrote of studying the Chinese language on the voyage out, and he anticipated mastery of the language during his first weeks in Hong Kong. Here we see Fryer bargaining with a Chinese merchant for the purchase of oranges, an incident as he relates it that is not without humor, conversing with a young boy, discussing religion with a Christian convert, and arguing religious points with a Buddhist priest.
Finally, in this letter Fryer presents himself interacting with men who would reside and work in China for many decades; Lechler was to remain until 1899, Eitel until 1897, Fryer himself until 1896. Fryer left Hong Kong later in 1863 to join W.A.P. Martin as Professor of English at the T'ung-wen Kuan, or Interpreter's College, in Peking. The chain of events leading to Fryer's departure from St. Paul's College and subsequent employment by Martin in Peking is unknown. However, after but two years in Peking at the T'ung-wen Kuan, Fryer is in 1865 again in the employ of the Church Missionary Society as headmaster of the Anglo-Chinese College, a not very prosperous school for Chinese boys in Shanghai, a post he was to hold until 1868, when he began work for the Chinese government as a translator at the arsenal at Kiangnan.
As in the letters published previously, an attempt has been made to balance the needs of modern usage with the very few peculiarities of the Fryer manuscripts. Fryer was inconsistent in his use of punctuation, particularly in the use of the colon and the apostrophe. Punctuation in this transcription is essentially as Fryer would have it in his manuscript; the reader will forgive an occasional irregular spelling. Fryer's run-on narrative has been separated into smaller paragraphs by the editor, and a caret used to indicate where such separations have been made to improve readability.