gynecee of any wealthy Chinese establishment, we think we have gathered quite enough from reading and conversation to justify us in regarding the Chinese lady from an entirely different point of view.  In novels, for instance, the heroine is always highly educated—­composes finished verses, and quotes from Confucius; and it is only fair to suppose that such characters are not purely and wholly ideal.  Besides, most young Chinese girls, whose parents are well off, are taught to read, though it is true that many content themselves with being able to read and write a few hundred words.  They all learn and excel in embroidery; the little knick-knacks which hang at every Chinaman’s waist-band being almost always the work of his wife or sister.  Visiting between Chinese ladies is of everyday occurrence, and on certain fete-days the temples are crowded to overflowing with “golden lilies"[*] of all shapes and sizes.  They give little dinner-parties to their female relatives and friends, at which they talk scandal, and brew mischief to their hearts’ content.  The first wife sometimes quarrels with the second, and between them they make the house uncomfortably hot for the unfortunate husband.  “Don’t you foreigners also dread the denizens of the inner apartments?” said a hen-pecked Chinaman one day to us—­and we think he was consoled to hear that viragos are by no means confined to China.  One of the happiest moments a Chinese woman knows, is when the family circle gathers round husband, brother, or it may be son, and listens with rapt attention and wondering credulity to a favourite chapter from the “Dream of the Red Chamber.”  She believes it every word, and wanders about these realms of fiction with as much confidence as was ever placed by western child in the marvellous stories of the “Arabian Nights.”

    [*] A poetical name for the small feet of Chinese women.

ETIQUETTE

If there is one thing more than another, after the possession of the thirteen classics, on which the Chinese specially pride themselves, it is politeness.  Even had their literature alone not sufficed to place them far higher in the scale of mental cultivation than the unlettered barbarian, a knowledge of those important forms and ceremonies which regulate daily intercourse between man and man, unknown of course to inhabitants of the outside nations, would have amply justified the graceful and polished Celestial in arrogating to himself the proud position he now occupies with so much satisfaction to himself.  A few inquiring natives ask if foreigners have any notion at all of etiquette, and are always surprised in proportion to their ignorance to hear that our ideas of ceremony are fully as clumsy and complicated as their own.  It must be well understood that we speak chiefly of the educated classes, and not of “boys” and compradores who learn in a very short time both to touch their caps and wipe their noses on their masters’ pocket-handkerchiefs.  Our observations will be confined to members of that vast body of men who pore day and night over the “Doctrine of the Mean,” and whose lips would scorn to utter the language of birds.