THOSE, who passed by Taku in the old days, probably rarely landed to visit the little community at Pilot Town. Yet there the pilots, who guide the steamers across the two mile wide Taku Bar, live, and—though, as wicked rumour has it, often doing their best to kill themselves—do not die, so healthy is the air. Anyhow, whatever rumour says, the pilots had made a very ship-shape little colony for themselves. Their houses had mostly mud walls and mud roofs like those of the neighbouring Chinese villages, but how clean and tidy mud walls can look when freshly whitewashed people must go to Pilot Town to see, as also what a wonderful jauntiness can be given by a judicious mixture of coal tar and white paint on gate posts. Like a regular good old-fashioned, English country village round its green, Pilot Town is built round its lawn tennis ground. They had two courts when we visited the place, and there were actually benches, that seemed to belong to the community at large, where lookers-on could sit and watch the players. They boasted then of having thirteen ladies, and the manners of Pilot Town were said already to have greatly changed under their softening influence. They had their Jubilee too, and though they did not boast that theirs was the loveliest in all the world, like Shanghai and Peking, yet they seemed to have thoroughly enjoyed it, “A picnic, and a supper, and a dance. We should not think anything of anything in North China that did not wind up with a dance.”