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All had gone well, and we were fast approaching the entrance to the Gulf of Pechili, when we encountered one of those tempests which are only to be met with in the Eastern seas pitch-black darkness, rain in one sheeted flood, like a second Deluge, blinding flashes of forked lightning more terrific than the gloom, and an almost uninterrupted crash of thunder amidst which the uproar of a pitched field would be inaudible.
A week or so later, after all the details of our treaty with the Chinese Government had been settled, and Lord Elgin departed from Pekin on his way to Europe on the conclusion of his highly successful mission, we likewise weighed anchor before the Gulf of Pechili should be closed by the ice and our egress therefrom barred for the winter months; and then, bidding a long farewell to the poetically-named but "beastly hole of a place," as Mr Jellaby called it, the "Bay of the Wide-spreading-sand Islands," we sailed for Hong Kong.
And when Simon was discovered reading 'The Pirates of Pechili, dexterously concealed in his prayer-book, the boy received a strapping that made his mother wince.
This sort of thing, I have said, went on for more than a month. The gunboat's cruising-ground was chiefly about the mouth of the Pechili Gulf, now under the frowning forts of Wei-hai-wei, and now opposite Port Arthur on the other side. There did not seem to be any regular blockade of the Gulf, though Japanese warships were constantly hovering about.
"By jingo!" cried Mr Jellaby, who was now our first lieutenant, having gained a step by the promotion of our former chief officer, "glass-eye;" though most of the old officers who had sailed with me from England paid off in the ship with us, there having been few changes in our complement, whether through death, disease or desertion, beyond the losses we had experienced in our unsuccessful attack on the Taku Forts, and from the subsequent sickness we had aboard when we were up the Gulf of Pechili in the hot season.
Kao-sung, then the Tang Emperor, despatched a general, Su Ting-fang, at the head of an army of two hundred thousand men. There was now no long and tedious overland march round the littoral of the Gulf of Pechili and across Liaotung.
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