ives.

PEKING, July 11.

They have the best melons here you ever saw. Their watermelons, which
are sold on the street in such quantities as to put even the southern
negroes to shame, are just like yellow ice cream in color, but they
aren't as juicy as ours. Their musk melons aren't spicy like the ones at
home at all, but are shaped like pears, only bigger and have an acid
taste; in fact they are more like a cucumber with a little acid pep in
them, only the seeds are all in the center like our melons. When you get
macaroons and little cakes here in straight Chinese houses you realize
that neither we nor the Europeans were the first to begin eating. They
either boil or steam their bread--they eat wheat instead of rice in this
part of the country--or fry it, and I have no doubt that doughnuts were
brought home to grandma by some old seafaring captain. These things are
all the stranger because, except for sponge cake, no such things are
indigenous to Japan. So when you first get here you can hardly resist
the impression that these things have been brought to China from America
or Europe. Read a book called "Two Heroes of Cathay," by Luella Miner,
and see how our country has treated some of these people in the past,
and then you see them so fond of America and of Americans and you
realize that in some ways they are ahead of us in what used to be known
as Christianity before the war. I guess we wrote you from Hangchow about
seeing the monument and shrine to two Chinese officials who were torn in
pieces at the time of the Boxer rebellion because they changed a
telegram to the provincial officers "Kill all foreigners" to read
"Protect all foreigners." The shrine is kept up, of course, by the
Chinese, and very few foreigners in China even know of the incident.

Their art is really childlike and all the new kinds of artists in
America who think being queer is being primitive ought to come over here
and study the Chinese in their native abodes. A great love of bright
colors and a wonderful knowledge of how to combine them, a comparatively
few patterns used over and over in all kinds of ways, and a preference
for designs that illustrate some story or idea or that appeal to their
sense of the funny--it's a good deal more childlike than what passes in
Greenwich Village for the childlike in art.

Y.M.C.A., PEKING, July 17.

A young Korean arrived here in the evening and he was met here on our
porch by a Chinese ci