Mr. Chu's Last Swallow

Last week the Canton Naval Club gave a dinner in honor of Vice Admiral Sir William Archibald Howard Kelly, Commander-in-Chief of Britain's China Station. Most of the officials of the Canton Government and tycoons of South China attended. The piece de resistance was a large grilled sea-snake. (Tropical sea-snakes are poisonous, but admired as a Chinese delicacy after head and poison glands have been carefully removed.*

Bravely overcoming Anglo-Saxon prejudice, Admiral Kelly absorbed the piece of tail that was his portion, suffered no ill effect. A bit of the neck went to Chu Chao-hsin, Inspector General of Foreign Affairs in the Canton Government, who ate it with relish and promptly died. Doctors opined that he had swallowed a bit of "poisonous bone," doubtless poisoned by gland secretion.

Chu Chao-hsin--Mr. Chu as he was known to most of Europe--was once a graduate student at Columbia University, once Charge d'Affaires at the Chinese Legation in London, later the most outspokenly anti-British of Chinese delegates to the League of Nations. In 1927 he horrified Geneva diplomats by declaring, during a debate on the opium question:

"If you can find a single man in China in whose breast there does not beat anti-British feeling, he is not Chinese."

* A U. S. snake farm in Florida does a small business with tinned rattlesnake meat.

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