In China, mind, and such outlandish places,
    A gentleman who wishes to be wed
  Looks round about among the pretty faces,
    Nor for a moment doubts they may be had
  For asking; and if any of them “nay” says,
    He has his remedy as soon as said—­
  For, when the bridegrooms disapprove what they do,
  They teach them manners with the bastinado.

  Near Te-pott’s palace lived an old Chinese—­
    About as poor a man as could be known
  In lands where guardians leave them to their ease,
    Nor pen the poor up in bastilles of stone: 
  He got a livelihood by picking teas;
    And of possessions worldly had but one—­
  But one—­the which, the reader must be told,
  Was a fair daughter seventeen years old.

  She was a lovely little girl, and one
    To charm the wits of both the high and the low;
  And Te-pott’s ancient heart was lost and won
    In less time than ’twould take my pen to tell how: 
  So, as he was quite an experienced son-
    In-law, and, too, a very wily fellow,
  To make Hy-son his friend was no hard matter, I
  Ween, with that specific for parents—­flattery.

  But, when they two had settled all between
    Themselves, and Te-pott thought that he had caught her,
  He found how premature his hopes had been
    Without the approbation of the daughter—­
  Who talk’d with voice so loud and wit so keen,
    That he thought all his Mrs. T’s had taught her;
  And, finding he was in the way there rather,
  He left her to be lectured by her father.

  “Pray, what were women made for” (so she said,
    Though Heaven forbid I join such tender saying),
  “If they to be accounted are as dead,
    And strangled if they ever are caught straying? 
  Tis well to give us diamonds for the head,
    And silken gauds for festival arraying;
  But where of dress or diamonds is the use
  If we mayn’t go and show them? that’s the deuce!”

  The father answer’d, much as fathers do
    In cases of like nature here in Britain,
  Where fathers seldom let fortunes slip through
    Their fingers, when they think that they can get one;
  He said a many things extremely true—­
    Proving that girls are fine things to be quit on,
  And that, could she accommodate her views to it,
  She would find marriage very nice when used to it.

  Now, ’tis no task to talk a woman into
    Love, or a dance, or into dressing fine—­
  No task, I’ve heard, to talk her into sin too;
    But, somehow, reason don’t seem in her line. 
  And so Miss Hy-son, spite of kith and kin too,
    Persisting such a husband to decline—­
  The eager mandarin issued a warrant,
  And got her apprehended by her parent.