Several times during my long residence in Hong Kong I endeavoured to read through the “Narrative of Fa-hien;” but though interested with the graphic details of much of the work, its columns bristled so constantly — now with his phonetic representations of Sanskrit words, and now with his substitution for them of their meanings in Chinese characters, and I was, moreover, so much occupied with my own special labours on the Confucian Classics, that my success was far from satisfactory.