e open streets, shoemakers and tailors are each
plying their art in their narrow shops. In one they manufacture little
paper offerings for the gods, in another the gods themselves, in the
next their worshippers are supplied with joss-sticks or gayly colored
candles of tallow, mounted on slim sticks, that they may be stuck in the
sand before the divinity. Here you will find a printer hard at work
taking impressions on their delicate paper; next a bookbinder, who sews
the leaves with withes of paper, while in the next shop you can procure
the almanac for the year, months before it is required. In August, 1863,
they were selling copies of the almanac for 1864. Probably this work has
the largest circulation of any in the world, hanging, as it does, in
every house. The only exception may be the Bible, which, it is to be
hoped, will yet be as widely circulated in China as it is among the
other nations of the world.

Numbers of the people are engaged in the delicate carving we so much
admire in the ivory toys scattered throughout Europe and America, and a
vast number of people in preparing the hanging screens with curious
devices, quaint pictures, and sentences from Confucius, which are found
in almost every house of the better class. They have a great fondness
for the proverbs and wise sayings which, are thus kept always before
their children, like the very good rules and aphorisms we see on the
walls of our Sunday schools.

A good example of the minute subdivision of the Chinese trades is seen
in the shops devoted exclusively to the sale of camel's-hair pencils,
and others for that of the little squares of red paper, covered with
hieroglyphics, which we receive on a pack of fire-crackers, and which
constitute its 'chop.'

Jewellers' shops contain very little interesting to a foreigner--most of
the rings and brooches are trashy articles of jade-stone, a greenish
stone which resembles agate or cornelian in opaqueness. The armlets are
of silver, and of the same substance are the large thin circles worn by
the women of Foh-Kien in the ear and resting on the shoulder. Pins for
the fantastic pyramid they erect with their rich black hair are rather
pretty, but are generally ornamented with false pearls. For pearls the
Chinese have a passion, but it requires a judge of the article to
purchase any from them, nine tenths of those in the shops being
fictitious. Seed pearls are also used by them as medicines. In the back
streets it i