On a Chinese Screen by William Somerset Maugham

A little man, portly, in a fantastic hat, like a bushranger's, with an immense brim, a pea-jacket such as you see in Leech's pictures of the seafaring man, and very wide check trousers of a cut fashionable heaven knows how many years ago. When he takes off his hat you see a fine head of long curly hair, and though he is approaching the sixties it is scarcely grey. His features are regular. He wears a collar several sizes too large for him so that his whole neck, massive and statuesque, is shown. He has the look of a Roman Emperor in a tragedy of the sixties and this air of an actor of the old school is enhanced by his deep booming voice. His stumpy frame makes it slightly absurd. You can imagine his declaiming the blank verse of Sheridan Knowles with an emphasis to rouse the pit to frenzy, and when he greets you, with too large a gesture, you guess how that resonant organ would tremble when he wrung your heart (in 1860) over the death of his child.

It was splendid a little later to hear him ask the Chinese servant for "me boots, boy, me boots. A kingdom for me boots. " He confessed that he should have been an actor.