the
blood, captains of industry, admirals, etc.; briefly, the name of the
writer, not the literary quality of the tale, is the important feature.
There are papers for babes, boys, girls, the sick and the well.

The most conspicuous literary names before the people are Howells,
Twain, and Harte, though one hears of scores of novelists, who, I
believe, will be forgotten in a decade or so. As I have said
previously, I am always joked with about the "Heathen Chinee." I have
really learned to play "poker," but I seldom if ever sit down to a game
that some one does not joke with me about "Ah Sin." Such is the American
idea of the proprieties and their sense of humor; yet I finally have
come to be so good an American that I can laugh also, for I am confident
the jokers mean it all in the best of feeling.

There are in America a class of litterateurs who are rarely heard of by
the masses, but to my mind they are among the greatest and most advanced
Americans. They are the astronomers, geologists, zoologists,
ornithologists, and others, authors of papers and articles in the
Government Reports of priceless value. These writers appear to me, an
outsider, to be the real safety-valves, the real backbone of the
literary productions of the day. With them science is but a synonym of
truth; they fling all superstition and ignorance to the winds, and
should be better known. Such names as Edison, Cope, Marsh, Hall, Young,
Field, Baird, Agassiz, and fifty more might be mentioned, all authors
whose books will give them undying fame, men who have devoted a lifetime
to research and the accumulation of knowledge; yet the author of the
last novel, "My Mule from New Jersey," will, for the day, have more
vogue among the people than any of these. But such is fame, at least in
America, where erudition is not appreciated as it is in "pagan" China.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] As a frontispiece to this volume, the cover design used on one of
these old Chinese books is shown.

[4] Spring and Autumn Annals.

[5] Great Learning.

[6] Confucian Analects.

[7] Doctrine of the Mean.

[8] Works of Mencius.

CHAPTER XI

THE POLITICAL BOSS

At an assembly-room in New York I met a famous American political
"boss." Many governors in China do not have the same power and
influence. I had letters to him from Senators ---- and ----. I expected
to meet a man of the highest culture, but what was my surprise to see a
huge, overgrown, uneducated Irishman,