politeness in China.

When a well-bred Chinaman, of whatever station, meets you for the first
time, he thus addresses you, first asking you how old you are:

"What is your honourable age?"

"I have been dragged up a fool so many years," you politely reply.

"What is your noble and exalted occupation?"

"My mean and contemptible calling is that of a doctor."

"What is your noble patronymic?"

"My poverty-struck family name is Mo."

"How many honourable and distinguished sons have you?"

"Alas! Fate has been niggardly; I have not even one little bug."

But, if you can truthfully say that you are the honourable father of
sons, your interlocutor will raise his clasped hands and say gravely,
"Sir, you are a man of virtue; I congratulate you." He continues--

"How many tens of thousands of pieces of silver have you?" meaning how
many daughters have you?

"My yatows" (forked heads or slave children), "my daughters," you answer
with a deprecatory shrug, "number so many."

So the conversation continues, and the more minute are the inquiries the
more polite is the questioner.

Unlike most of the Western nations, the Chinese have an overmastering
desire to have children. More than death itself the Chinaman fears to
die without leaving male progeny to worship at his shrine; for, if he
should die childless, he leaves behind him no provision for his support
in heaven, but wanders there a hungry ghost, forlorn and forsaken--an
"orphan" because he has no children. "If one has plenty of money," says
the Chinese proverb, "but no children, he cannot be reckoned rich; if
one has children, but no money, he cannot be considered poor." To have
sons is a foremost virtue in China; "the greatest of the three unfilial
things," says Mencius, "is to have no children." (Mencius, iv., pt. i.,
26).

In China longevity is the highest of the five grades of felicity.
Triumphal arches are erected all over the kingdom in honour of those who
have attained the patriarchal age which among us seems only to be
assured to those who partake in sufficient quantity of certain
fruit-salts and pills. Age when not known is guessed by the length of
the beard, which is never allowed to grow till the thirty-second year.
Now it happens that I am clean-shaven, and, as it is a well-known fact
that the face of the European is an enigma to the Oriental, just as the
face of the Chinaman is an inscrutable mystery to most of us, I have
often been amused by the