of mind.

It will be difficult for the average American to conceive it possible
that a cultivated Chinaman, of all persons, should have been honestly
amused at our civilization; that he should have considered what Mrs.
Trollope called "our great experiment" in republics a failure, and our
institutions, fashions, literary methods, customs and manners, sports
and pastimes as legitimate fields for wit and unrepressed jollity. Yet
in the unbosoming of this cultivated "heathen" we see our fads and
foibles held up as strange gods, and must confess some of them to be
grotesque when seen in this yellow light.

It is doubtless true that the masses of Americans do not take the
Chinaman seriously, and an interesting feature of this correspondence is
the attitude of the Chinaman on this very point and his clever satire on
our assumption of perfection and superiority over a nation, the habits
of which have been fixed and settled for many centuries. The writer's
experiences in society, his acquaintance with American women of fashion
and their husbands, all ingeniously set forth, have the hall-mark of
actual novelty, while his loyalty to the traditions of his country and
his egotism, even after the Americanizing process had exercised its
influence over him for years, add to the interest of the recital.

In revising the correspondence and rearranging it under general heads,
the editor has preserved the salient features of it, with but little
essential change and practically in its original shape. If the reader
misses the peculiar idioms, or the pigeon-English that is usually placed
in the mouth of the Chinaman of the novel or story, he or she should
remember that the writer of the letters, while a "heathen Chinee," was
an educated gentleman in the American sense of the term. This fact
should always be kept in mind because, as the author remarks, to many
Americans whom he met, it was "incomprehensible that a Chinaman can be
educated, refined, and cultivated according to their own standards."

With pardonable pride he tells how, on one occasion, when a woman in New
York told him she knew her ancestral line as far back as 1200 A. D., he
replied that he himself had "a tree without a break for thirty-two
hundred years." He was sure she did not believe him, but he found her
"indeed!" delightful. The author's name has been withheld for personal
reasons that will be sufficiently obvious to those who read the letters.
The period during whic