Hong Kong 2. June 1856.
My dear Sir,
I would have replied long ago to your note of the 23rd May last but have been laid up in bed.
What Mr. Audley told me on 16 May regarding you was as follows. That there had been a dinner party at Government House on the 13th or 14th, I think, at which you behaved so strangely that he conceived you to be under the influence of liquor and that he was confirmed in this belief by His Excellency Sir John Bowring. Who, after the company had dispersed, gave him clearly to understand that he also considered you inebriated. I cannot at this distance of time remember the precise words which were spoken, but the tenor was plainly this and nothing else: that you were intoxicated and behaved in such a manner as to render it apparent.