ent and respectful interest;
and always as I read, my own little venture seemed to wither and
vanish in the light of a profounder knowledge and a wider judgment
than I shall ever attain. For I have not visited workhouses and
factories, I know little more about German taxes than about English
ones, and I have no statistics for the instruction and entertainment
of the intelligent reader. I can take him inside a German home, but I
can give him no information about German building laws. I know how
German women spend their days, but I know as little about the exact
function of a Buergermeister as about the functions of a Mayor. In
short, my knowledge of Germany, like my knowledge of England, is based
on a series of life-long, unclassified, more or less inchoate
impressions, and the only excuse I have for writing about either
country I find in my own and some other people's trivial minds.

When I read of a country unknown or only slightly known, I like to be
told all the insignificant trifles that make the common round of life.
It is assuredly desirable that the great movements should be watched
and described for us; but we want pictures of the people in their
homes, pictures of them at rest and at play, as well as engaged in
those public works that make their public history. For no reason in
the world I happen to be interested in China, but I am still waiting
for just the gossip I want about private life there. We have Pierre
Loti's exquisite dream pictures of his deserted palace at Pekin, and
we have many useful and expert accounts of the roads, mines, railways,
factories, laws, politics, and creeds of the Celestial Empire. But the
book I ask for could not be written by anyone who was not of Chinese
birth, and it would probably be written by a woman. It might not have
much literary form or value, but it would enter into those minutiae of
life that the masculine traveller either does not see or does not
think worth notice. The author of such a small-beer chronicle must
have been intimate from childhood with the Chinese point of view,
though her home and her friends were in a foreign land. She would
probably not know much about her ancestral laws and politics, but she
would have known ever since she could hear and speak just what Chinese
people said to each other when none but Chinese were by, what they
ate, what they wore, how they governed their homes, the relationship
between husband and wife, parents and children, master