's eye their world is one huge,
comical antithesis of our own. What we regard intuitively in one way
from our standpoint, they as intuitively observe in a diametrically
opposite manner from theirs. To speak backwards, write backwards, read
backwards, is but the a b c of their contrariety. The inversion extends
deeper than mere modes of expression, down into the very matter of
thought. Ideas of ours which we deemed innate find in them no home,
while methods which strike us as preposterously unnatural appear to
be their birthright. From the standing of a wet umbrella on its handle
instead of its head to dry to the striking of a match away in place
of toward one, there seems to be no action of our daily lives, however
trivial, but finds with them its appropriate reaction--equal but
opposite. Indeed, to one anxious of conforming to the manners and
customs of the country, the only road to right lies in following
unswervingly that course which his inherited instincts assure him to be
wrong.

Yet these people are human beings; with all their eccentricities they
are men. Physically we cannot but be cognizant of the fact, nor mentally
but be conscious of it. Like us, indeed, and yet so unlike are they
that we seem, as we gaze at them, to be viewing our own humanity in
some mirth-provoking mirror of the mind,--a mirror that shows us our own
familiar thoughts, but all turned wrong side out. Humor holds the glass,
and we become the sport of our own reflections. But is it otherwise at
home? Do not our personal presentments mock each of us individually
our lives long? Who but is the daily dupe of his dressing-glass, and
complacently conceives himself to be a very different appearing person
from what he is, forgetting that his right side has become his left, and
vice versa? Yet who, when by chance he catches sight in like manner of
the face of a friend, can keep from smiling at the caricatures which the
mirror's left-for-right reversal makes of the asymmetry of that
friend's features,--caricatures all the more grotesque for being utterly
unsuspected by their innocent original? Perhaps, could we once see
ourselves as others see us, our surprise in the case of foreign peoples
might be less pronounced.

Regarding, then, the Far Oriental as a man, and not simply as
a phenomenon, we discover in his peculiar point of view a new
importance,--the possibility of using it stereoptically. For his
mind-photograph of the world can be placed side