The Montgomery advertiser., 1908-01-12
CHAPTERS ON
 CHINA COAST
PORTS WHERE ADvENTURERs or
 ALL THE WORLD MEET.
Always Certain to Find Victims ia the Foreign Colonies--Women as Well as Men Among the Wayfny-
 CTS Who PIunder.

| and the beach-comber from every par | allel. They take in the coast coming and going. If ever there is a bit of 1 unpieasantness with the police of Ber- lin. St. Petersburg. Chicago or san Francisco the general high wayman makes for the land that lies east of the ls0th meridian. there to-edne to q sure reward that is golden and take little pleasure In passing.
 I All this comes about because the col- l onies of Europeans scattered from the Straits up along the coast to the froz- en circle are always guilible. owing to their insularity. Provincial from 1 things in Europe and America, the | people who constitute the little foreign colonies in the various ports of China, Japan and the Straits Settlement fall | easy prey to the suave tongue and the | polished manner of the wayfayer who | plunders.
 After one colony Is fieeced the dis l eliminating rogue moves on to another. | leaving a broad track of bitter memo- ries behind. There Is the instance of | the polished gentleman who dropped | into Yokohana few years ago with | batch of letters of introduction from hypothetical persons in India. This Captain Blank was so dashing 8 1 fellow that the English set in Yoko- l hama took him up with gusto. He f1ived at the best hotel ordered expen sive suits from Tom. the Chinese tailor, and was dined on the Bluff with all the conhicaf eciat that is of the Eng fish colonial.
 Then Captain Blank consented to take the leading part in some private theat ricals. He wooed the daughter Of q bank manager at rehearsals, borrowed 5000 yen and diamond ring from the 5nA Ara IA axyo rf fbA performance eloped with the daughter, the diamond ring and the money. He cast the girl of at Hong Kong and travelled light into the unknown waters beyond
 Hardly had Yokohama society recov- cred from the shock of this experience when Mime. Memo. the name will it, as we'll as any other. dropped into town. It was during the Russo Japanese war. Mime. Memo said that she was accred- ited as a correspondent of The London Mail to write some of the real inside history of the war. She bore q letter, subsequently, found to, be forged, from London editor to Mrs. Hugh Frazer, the well-known writer of things Japan ese, and wife of a former minister of Great Britain to Japan.
 Mrs. Memo came to town in Novem- Der. It was chilly. but the engaging lady, with the slight Scandinavian ac- cent, wore her summer lawns. Shortly after she arrived the story cfept up the coast that her trunks had been held for board bill by the Astor House in Shanghai.
 Mrs. Frazer and others who had ac- ceptedethe lady as genuine fouted the story and she obtained d temporary ad- vance from some of her admirers among the ladies of the English colony. She blossoH1ed out in new suits and her | faded beauty was brfghtened by the | change. She attended all the exclusive functions given in Yokohama and To- kio, and was high in the social world | when suddenly she left town. It was only after she had taken a | steamer at Kobe for Shanghai, on mon- ey wheedIed out of 8 rich American in the former port, that 1t became known that she had worked bIae<mai1 game | on an Englishnaan who lived on thin ice fin Yokohama, borrowed various hundreds of yen from the women who l had befriended her and had been sus- piciously near to spying on some of the Japanese secrets.
 Mime. Memo afterward f1orsewhipped a Russian secretary of legation in the Astor House at Shanghai and disap- peared. Yet the folk in Yokohama still speak of her as such a really charming | person."
 The Dane in the red dinner coat was | the ten days wonder of Shanghai a few years ago. It was the red dinner coat that did it all,
 Because he dropped in the dining room on the evening of his arrival, garbed in scarlet, all of the men who make the Astor House their club and l the centre of their existence, jumped to the conclusion that the Danish gen tleman, whose name appeared on the register with title prehxed, must be a person of circumstance.
 Red dinner coats were immediately ordered. from the Chinese tailors of Shanghai and overtures were made for the Danish gentleman's acquaintance He held aloof for just the psychological period, tantaliZing the men and fasci- hating the women.
 Then he allowed two of the wealthi- est men in the foreign colony of Shan ghai to become his intimates, sold them several thousand taels' worth of stock in a tin mine in the Malay States and moved on. There were no more red dinner coats in the Astor dining room after that. And for some months Danes were as scarce as the tin in the Malay mines.
 Not all of the strange gentry that circulate through the ports of the coast are beasts of prey Some are delight fully unique and also harmless. The antics of Capt. Miles Reilly of the steamship Montara is a case in point
 Captain Reilly had taken one of the Spreckels steamers out of San Fran cisco, bound for Petropavlovsky, or the Siberian coast. The ship was lader with contraband of war. and two Ja, panese cruisers intercepted CaptaIr Reilly just before he made the desolatt northern port
 They brought the Montara down tc Yokohama and held Captain Reilly as a witness to testify at the Prize Court proceedings. Japanese never do any thing in a hurry. Court adjourned fol the hot months just after Captair | Reilly arrived in Yokohama.
 He chafed and swore at delay, and his soul irked him so that he turned to strange pleasures. The first thing he did was to give his plug hat to the rickshawA boy wlso pulled him about the streets
 The boy was promptly arrested by the police on suspicion that he had stolen the hat. After Reilly had con vinced the authorities that the boy did not steal the hat and that he had a right to wear it. the police made the coolie paint his license numbers in sprawling. white ideogfaphs on the hinter side of that glossy crown.
 After that Yokohama never tired of seeing Reilly trudling down Main street behind the sweating, almost naked coolie and the rakish plug hal adorned with white ideographs. Reilly always pointed with pride at the giddy rickishaw boy as he passed acquain- tances.
 It was that same Reilly who one l pig svlo1yfpar Ca1fic f,,r