The despatch which once a month brought me my stipend was
always addressed to me as president of the Wuchang University,
though as a matter of fact I might as well have been styled president
of the University of Weissnichtwo. In one point he went beyond his
agreement, viz., in giving me free of charge a furnished house
of two stories, with ten rooms and a garden. It was on the bank
of the "Great River" with the picturesque hills of Hanyang nearly
opposite, a site which I preferred to any other in the city. I there
enjoyed the purest air with a minimum of inconvenience from narrow,
dirty streets. To these exceptional advantages it is doubtless due
that my health held out, notwithstanding the heat of the climate,
which, the locality being far inland and in lat. 30 deg. 30', was that
of a fiery furnace. On the night of the autumnal equinox, my first
in Wuchang, the mercury stood in my bedroom at 102 deg.. I was the
guest of the Rev. Arnold Foster of the London Missionary
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Society, whose hospitality was warm in more ways than one.
The viceroy returned from Peking, broken in health; the little
strength he had left was given to military preparation for the
contingencies of the Russo-Japanese War; and his university was
consigned to the limbo of forgotten dreams.
Viceroy Chang has been derided, not quite justly, as possessing a
superabundance of initiative along with a rather scant measure of
finality, taking up and throwing down his new schemes as a child
does its playthings.
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