ible to find some sort of an excuse if one is bent on doing it.

We live to-day in a time of surprises. Turkey is reforming, China waking
up, the self-satisfied complacency of the white race has received a
shock, and more are feared. Most of us of the West are anxious to get
over the wall, or look around it,--we are told it is there,--and see
what that other man is really like. We read books written by those who
have spent years in China, in Japan, in India, and we realize that they
know thoroughly this or that corner of the whole. We talk with the man
who has lived his life among the people of the East, and we feel that he
has plumbed them to the core--along one line. He has preached to them,
he has healed them, he has traded with them, and he knows them as the
doctor or the trader knows his community. The men and women of the West
who have spent their lives in the East have usually gone there with
definite purpose and compelling duties. They rarely see more than one
part of the whole country, their work holds them fast, and they are
prone to see it from the point of view of the interest that took them
there. Out of these chapters of intimate knowledge can be put together a
great exhaustive study of the whole, but no one has done that yet; the
time has not come, perhaps.

Now the traveller with no preoccupying purpose, and fresh from a bird's
eye view of large sections of the country, is likely to talk a good deal
of nonsense, and yet he may tell some things of interest that the old
resident has ceased to see from very familiarity. If you mention them,
he says, "of course," but to those at home they are not "of course," and
sometimes they are worth telling.

My first and my most lasting impression of the Chinese was how very like
they are to us. I had been told it was a mistake to approach China from
the east: you touched twelve at once. Nowhere would you find another
country and people so strange, so different from anything before
imagined. Rather you should approach China from the west, then with each
stage as you travelled eastward stranger and ever stranger worlds would
open before you. That is what I did; it just happened so. India was
already somewhat known to me, and on this trip I stopped there only a
few weeks, seeing each day more that was difficult to understand, and
then I went on to China, and to my great surprise felt myself almost at
home.

Of course at first sight most things were queer, that is to s