It is humbly noted that during July Your officer heard rumors that in the Ch‘ao-chou-Swatow area there was an English barbarian, Su-li-wan,¹ pretending to be in charge of customs and in collusion with local gangsters, squatting there and fraudulently collecting customs. Notice was sent the Kwangtung governor general and governor and the Canton customs superintendent to prohibit this entirely. Now a communication is received from the acting governor general of Kwangtung [sic] Lao Ch‘ung-kuang, regarding the collection of likin for military supplies at Ch‘ao-chou and Swatow, that he has received a report from his deputy Yi En-heng that there is a foreign merchant, Sha-li-yün, who has helped detect smuggling and is quite rigorous.

The waggoner hearing this piteous appeal come out of the casier, jumped off the horse much frightened, and called the servants and his master, and they opened the casier, and found the poor prisoner all smeared and be-yellowed with eggs, cheese, milk, and more than a hundred other things, indeed it would have been hard to say which there was most of, — in such a pitiable condition was the poor lover.

Dead easy: the ones who watched it all died. (Invoke Langford's Basilisk if you need a real reason.)

Ichthyotoxins are sufficiently widely present in the reef fish of tropical oceans, and with a sufficiently unpredictable occurrence, as to render the large-scale commercialization of snappers, groupers, jack, and other large, marketable fish a chancy business; in some iland groups, such as (it is claimed) Johnston and Phenix, very high percentages of species are toxic.