nation; the pains he will be at to comply with well-known
principles in the construction and arrangement of his private
house--all prove that the iron of Feng-shui has entered into his soul,
and that the creed he has been suckled in is the very reverse of
outworn. The childlike faith of his early years gradually ripens into
a strong and vigorous belief against which ridicule is perhaps the
worst weapon that can possibly be used. Nothing less than years of
contact with foreign nations and deep draughts of that real science
which is even now stealing imperceptibly upon them, will bring the
Chinese to see that Feng-shui is a vain shadow, that it has played its
allotted part in the history of a great nation, and is now only fit to
be classed with such memories of by-gone glory as the supremacy of
China, the bow and arrow, the matchlock, and the junk.

MONEY

Few things are more noticeable in China than the incessant chattering
kept up by servants, coolies, and members of the working classes. It
is rare to meet a string of porters carrying their heavy burdens along
some country road, who are not jabbering away, one and all, as if in
the very heat of some exciting discussion, and afraid that their
journey will come to an end before their most telling arguments are
exhausted. One wonders what ignorant, illiterate fellows like these
can possibly have to talk about to each other in a country where
beer-shop politics are unknown, where religious disputations leave no
sting behind, and want of communication limits the area of news to
half-a-dozen neighbouring streets in a single agricultural village.
Comparing the uncommunicative deportment of a bevy of English
bricklayers, who will build a house without exchanging much beyond an
occasional pipe-light, with the vivacious gaiety of these
light-hearted sons of Han, the problem becomes interesting enough to
demand a solution of the question--What is it these Chinamen talk
about? And the answer is, _Money_. It may be said they talk, think,
dream of nothing else. They certainly live for little besides the hope
of some day compassing, if not wealth, at any rate a competency. The
temple of Plutus--to be found in every Chinese city--is rarely without
a suppliant; but there is no such hypocrisy in the matter as that of
the Roman petitioner who would pray aloud for virtue and mutter
"gold." And yet a rich man in China is rather an object of pity than
otherwise. He is marked out by t