Lost Leaders | Page 8

anecdotes, and the question to be asked is this--How does it
happen that in ages and societies so distant and so various identical
stories are current? What is the pressure that makes neoplatonic gossips
of the fourth century circulate the same marvels as spiritualist gossips
of the nineteenth? How does it happen that the mediaeval saint, the
Indian medicine-man, the Siberian shaman (a suggestive term), have
nearly identical wonders attributed to them? If people wanted merely to
tell "a good square lie," as the American slang has it, invention does not

seem to have such pitifully narrow boundaries. It appears to follow that
there are contagious nervous illusions, about which science has not said
the last word. We believe that the life of children, with its innocent
mixture of dreams and waking, facts and fancies, could supply odd
parallels to the stories we have been treated to. And as we are on the
subject, we should like, as the late President Lincoln said, to tell a little
story. It occurred to a learned divine to meet a pupil, who ought by
rights to have been in the University of Oxford, walking in Regent
Street. The youth glided past like a ghost, and was lost in the crowd;
next day his puzzled preceptor received a note, dated on the previous
day from Oxford, telling how the pupil had met the teacher by the Isis,
and on inquiry had heard he was in London. Here is a case of
levitation--of double levitation, and we leave it to be explained by the
followers of Abaris and of Mr. Home.

A CHINAMAN'S MARRIAGE.
The Court of Assizes at Paris has lately been occupied with the case of
a Chinese gentleman, whose personal charms and literary powers make
him worthy to be the compatriot of Ah-Sin, that astute Celestial.
Tin-tun- ling is the name--we wish we could say, with Thackeray's F.
B., "the highly respectable name"--of the Chinese who has just been
acquitted on a charge of bigamy. In China, it is said that the more
distinguished a man is the shorter is his title, and the name of a very
victorious general is a mere click or gasp. On this principle, the
trisyllabic Tin-tun-ling must have been without much honour in his
own country. In Paris, however, he has learned Parisian aplomb, and
when confronted with his judges and his accusers, his air, we learn,
"was very calm." "His smile it was pensive and bland," like the
Heathen Chinee's, and his calm confidence was justified by events. It
remains to tell the short, though not very simple, tale of Tin-tun-ling.
Mr. Ling was born in 1831, in the province of Chan-li. At the
interesting age of eighteen, an age at which the intellect awakens and
old prejudices lose their grasp, he ceased to burn gilt paper on the
tombs of his ancestors; he ceased to revere their august spirits; he gave
up the use of the planchette, rejected the teachings of Confucius, and, in

short, became a convert to Christianity. This might be considered either
as a gratifying testimony to the persuasive powers of Catholic
missionaries, or as an example of the wiles of Jesuitism, if we did not
know the inner history of Mr. Ling's soul, the abysmal depths of his
personality. He has not, like many other modern converts, written a
little book, such as "How I ceased to chinchin Joss; or, from Confucius
to Christianity," but he has told Madame Judith Mendes all about it.
Madame Mendes has made a name in literature, and English readers
may have wondered how the daughter of the poet Theophile Gautier
came to acquire the knowledge of Chinese which she has shown in her
translations from that language. It now appears that she was the pupil
of Tin-tun-ling, who, in a moment of expansion, confided to her that he
adopted the Catholic faith that he might eat a morsel of bread. He was
starving, it seems; he had eaten nothing for eight days, when he threw
himself on the charity of the missionaries, and received baptism. Since
Winckelmann turned renegade, and became a Roman Catholic merely
that the expenses of his tour to Rome and his maintenance there might
be paid, there have surely been few more mercenary converts.
Tin-tun-ling was not satisfied with being christened into the Church, he
was also married in Catholic rites, and here his misfortunes fairly began,
and he entered on the path which has led him into difficulty and
discredit.
The French, as a nation, are not remarkable for their accuracy in the use
of foreign proper names, and we have a difficulty in believing that the
name of Mr. Ling's first wife was really Quzia-Tom-Alacer. There is a
touch of M. Hugo's famous Tom Jim Jack, the British tar,