Jelland's Voyage by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

"Well," said our Anglo-Jap as we all drew up our chairs round the / smoking-room fire, "it's an old tale out yonder, and may have spilt over / into print for all I know. I don't want to turn this club-room into a / chestnut stall, but it is a long way to the Yellow Sea, and it is just / as likely that none of you have ever heard of the yawl _Matilda_, and of / what happened to Henry Jelland and Willy McEvoy aboard of her.

"The middle of the sixties was a stirring time out in Japan. That was / just after the Simonosaki bombardment, and before the Daimio affair. / There was a Tory party and there was a Liberal party among the natives, / and the question that they were wrangling over was whether the throats / of the foreigners should be cut or not. I tell you all, politics have / been tame to me since then. If you lived in a treaty port, you were / bound to wake up and take an interest in them. And to make it better, / the outsider had no way of knowing how the game was going. If the / opposition won it would not be a newspaper paragraph that would tell him / of it, but a good old Tory in a suit of chain mail, with a sword in each / hand, would drop in and let him know all about it in a single upper cut.