Extracts from my letter of Oct. 9th. 1893
to the Secretary of State.
31
By a letter from the Colonial Office addressed
to my self and dated May 17th. 1892 it was suggested that
I might devote some portion of my leave to studying
Chinese under Mr. Douglas, a Professor of Chinese at Kings.
College. I accordingly applied to Mr. Douglas but as he
could only speak the Mandarin dialect and not the
Cantonese he was obviously of no assistance to me. I
thereupon entered into correspondence with various
missionaries who one and all expressed their opinion that
it was a hopeless task to attempt to earn Chinese in
England. However at last I found a gentleman Un Grainger Hargreaves
) a missionary who had lately returned to
England after 14 years residence in Canton and with him I
studied Cantonese for four mornings a week during the last
six months of my leave at home.
On getting back to HongKong I at once engaged a
Chinese teacher, but I found that the duties of Registrar
of the Supreme Court to which I had been appointed as and
from October 14th. 1892 quite precluded me from having any
continuous time for study. Cadets when they came out here
at the age of 21 are sent up to country and have all their
time to bestow on the study of the language, but a man of my age (over 39 years) with the duties of Registrar to
attend to has very little time to spare.
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