above,
and may be regarded by many even as flippant; but the fact is that a
successful study of the Chinese people cannot possibly be confined to
their classics and higher literature, and to the problem of their origin
and subsequent development where we now find them. It must embrace the
lesser, not to say meaner, details of their everyday life, if we are
ever to pierce the mystery which still to a great extent surrounds them.

In this sense an Italian student of Chinese, Baron Vitale, has gone so
far as to put together and publish a collection of Chinese nursery
rhymes, from which it is not difficult to infer that Chinese babies are
very much as other babies are in other parts of the world.

And it has always seemed to me that the Chinese baby's father and
mother, so far as the ordinary springs of action go, are very much of a
pattern with the rest of mankind.

One reason why the Chinaman remains a mystery to so many is due, no
doubt, to the vast amount of nonsense which is published about him.

First of all, China is a very large country, and from want of proper
means of communication for many centuries, there has been nothing like
extensive intercourse between North, South, East, West, and Central. Of
course the officials visit all parts of the Empire, as they are
transferred from post to post; but the bulk of the people never get far
beyond the range of their own district city.

The consequence is that as regards manners and customs, while retaining
an indelible national imprint, the Chinese people have drifted apart
into separate local communities; so that what is true of one part of the
country is by no means necessarily true of another.

The Chinese themselves say that manners, which they think are due to
climatic influences, change every thirty miles; customs, which they
attribute to local idiosyncrasies, change every three hundred miles.

Now, a globe-trotter goes to Canton, and as one of the sights of that
huge collection of human beings, he is taken to shops,--there used to be
three,--where the flesh of dogs, fed for the purpose, is sold as food.

He comes home, and writes a book, and says that the Chinese people live
on dogs' flesh.

When I was a boy, I thought that every Frenchman had a frog for
breakfast. Each statement would be about equally true. In the north of
China, dogs' flesh is unknown; and even in the south, during all my
years in China I never succeeded in finding any Chinaman who eith