Most residents in Shanghai have, at some time in their lives, to write the three letters P.P.C. on a number of cards. It is a work to which wa attach various degrees of importance, and which we attempt with mingled feelings. The man who has, in familiar language, "made his pile" and who goes home with the satisfactory consciousness of having accomplished the objects he had in view when he sot foot on the deck ofthe Southampton steamer, ten years ago, writes the three letters with a bold hand, and adds a jubilant-flourish to the final one, to express a grateful sense of blessings received and improved. As he"scrawls the letters on the paste-board, he conjures up delightful visions of a happy future in England or the States, and of frequent visits to that distracting Elysium of delight, Paris. It would be curious, and perhaps a little humiliating, to attempt an- analysis of a man's feelings at what novelists call this " supreme moment." We should find, unquestionably, an odd contexture of emotions crossing and intertwining the one with the other, in the web of thought; and we should gain an improving insight into the way in which images of different colours and size lose their relative importance, and the world will go on, in spite of a rain of paste-board as thick as the shower of leaves that pour down from deciduous trees. Somehow, to use the phrase of a well-known statesman, "Her Majesty's government is carried on," in spite of sinister auguries to the effect that it must collapse in six weeks; and, in like manner, to compare small things with great, the business and family life of this strange city community will progress, through sun and shadow, though our tables were piled with the P. P. C> cards of those who seem now to bear the world in hand. Indeed, it is a painful reflection that, sometimes, the news that a particu-present themselves in a distorted aspect, when the mind is agitated. A many when he writes " P. P. C." on his cards on leav-lar individual intends leaving the place, arouses lively emotions of pleasure in the breasts of the multitude with ill regulated ing China, thinks probably of his old father and mother, of the sister he left about the height of his knee, and a trout stream on the banks of which he loved to linger, of his balance at the bankers, of the inconvenience of wearing a chimney-pot-hat, of the changes he shall see in London, of the soup at the Trois fures," of the influx of Indian children at Galle, of the disgusting affliction of sea sickness, and of the ballet at the Grand Opera. Then, at last, the cards are written. The farewell dinner given. The gunpowder exploded with streperous clamour, and the exit becomes an accomplished fact.
But there are other occasions when the writing of these three mysterious letters is unattended with such pleasurable agitation. All men who leave Shanghai do not make piles, and the departure may be shadowed by many surrounding circumstances of sorrow and depression, The man whose career has been an unsuccessful struggle, and who has by consequence few friends, sends out less numerous paste boards than his fortunate rival, and hesitates along tinie as to who shall have them. He is uncertain how the social tickets of leave will be received by quondam friends, and after directing half a score of envelopes, Infelix often tears them up, lest their enclosures be coldly or harshly commented upon. It is only needful to allude slightly to the sadder occasions of departure, when we receive cards with broad black edges, and know that the friend who sends this memorial, leaves all that has blessed his life, in the unfriendly land whose shores are fading from his eyes as we read the sadly suggestive letters.
There is a well known saying of Archbishop Leighton, to the effect that he wished to die in an inn, as it seemed to him that ahostelxy, with its recurring crowd of arriving guests, and its thronging multitude of outgoers, wasa type of the world. Those who live in Shanghai acquire almost as vivid an idea of the changeableness of life, as though they resided in an hotel. People are always coming and always going. Life, here, is not ill represented by Tennysor line 'a madness of farewells." Still it is amazing how, in spite of depressing influences, we contrive to keep up a flow of minds, who have profited by observing his social and commercial mistakes.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.