icularly the houses,
certain forms identical, inevitable, exasperating by common repetition.
It has been said that poetry is not in things, it is in us; but in China
very little poetry comes into the homes and lives of the common
millions: they are all dead dwelling-houses, even the best, bare homes
without life or brightness. Among the working-classes of the West there
is to be found a kind of ministering beauty which makes its way
everywhere, springing from the hands of woman. When the dwelling is
cramped, the purse limited, the table modest, a woman who has the gift
finds a way to make order and puts care and art into everything in her
house, puts a soul into the inanimate, and gives those subtle and
winsome touches to which the most brutish of human beings is sensible.
But in China woman does nothing of this. Her life is unaesthetic to the
last degree. No happy improvisations or touches of the stamp of
personality enter her home; one cannot trace the touches of witchery in
the tying of a ribbon. Everywhere you find the same class of furniture
and garniture, the same shape of table, of stool, of form, of bed, of
cooking utensils, of picture, of everything; and all the details of her
housekeeping are so apathetically uninteresting. The Chinese woman has
no charming art, rather is it a common, horrid, daily grind. She is not,
as the woman should be, the interpreter in her home of her own grace,
and she differs from her Western sister in that it is impossible for her
to express in her dress also the little personalities of character--all
is eternally the same. But I know so very little of ladies' clothing,
and therefore cease.

Quarrying was going on high up among the hills as I left the city. Men
were out of sight, but their hammering was heard distinctly. As each
boulder was freed these wielders of the hammer yelled to passers-by to
look out for their heads, gave the stone a push to start it rolling, and
if it rolled upon you it was your own fault and not theirs--you should
have seen to it that you were somewhere else at the time. If it blocked
the pathway, another had to be made by those who made the traffic.
Directly under the quarry I was accosted by a beggar. "Old foreign man!
Old foreign man!" he yelled. Stones were falling fast; it is possible
that he does not sit there now.

Physiognomists do not swarm in China. There is grand scope for someone.
There would be ample material for research for the student in the