meanwhile might go out to drink tea with his countrymen. I
gave permission, but on returning some hours later to the hotel found
him in a very disappointed frame of mind, which was accounted for by
his explanation that the Chinese residents in Nagasaki were all
Cantonese, and that not being able to understand a word of mandarin
they had perforce been obliged to converse with each other as best
they could in pidgin English. He said, "Looksee b'long all same
Chinaman, no savez talkee."

The Pekingese are very discriminative and frequently condescendingly
refer to all other Chinese as "outside men" or "foreigners."

Pidgin English is a queer jargon composed of a verbatim translation of
Chinese sentences together with a slight admixture of Portuguese and
French, the frequent wrongful substitution of similar sounding words
and a lavish use of the terminals _ee_ and _o_.

"S'pose you wantchee catchee olo chinaware, compradore savez talkee
my," represents, "If you want to get some old chinaware your Chinese
agent will let me know," while I have heard "two times twicee" for
"twice two," and "last day to-night" for "last evening."

The word _pidgin_ means _work_ of any kind, as in "plenty pidgin" or
"no got pidgin," and _pidgin English_ simply means a workable
knowledge of colloquial English as picked up by tradesmen, servants
and coolies, in contradistinction to English as taught in the
schools.

On the northern frontiers there is also pidgin Russian.

The written language is the same everywhere, each character, of which
the Chinese say there are between eighty and a hundred thousand,
representing a complete word, so that before being able to read, and
more especially write, a single sentence, each individual character in
it must be closely studied and committed to memory, as we commit to
memory the letters of the alphabet, but with the difference that
whereas the alphabet consists of but twenty-six simple letters,
Chinese caligraphy contains almost a hundred thousand characters of
extreme complexity.

From earliest boyhood to the grave Chinese students never cease, yet
never complete, committing these characters to memory and welding them
into those graceful verses and essays which are the pride of Chinese
literature.

Handwriting is accounted a fine art, and for many hours each day, year
in and year out, characters are laboriously copied by means of a
little brush filled with ink, which in the form of a cake or stic