We have never cared very much for jokes in which the point is made by bad spelling, We have always considered a piece of fan which depends on an unusual or eccentric dialect as feeble. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule; the most noteworthy being the letters of Tabitha Bramble in "Humphrey Clinker" and Florac's English in the "Newcomes." The same objection which applies to unusual spelling applies in a certain degree to jests of which "Pidgin English" is the vehicle, It is one of the good signs of Shanghai that this detestable lingo is not so prominent as it once was, and that a large number of Chinamen now discourse in very respectable English.
join English jokes belonged to an easy-going happy-go-lucky period, and, like the expletives referred to by Bob Acres, have had their day.—At the same time, the student of manners would omit @ very curious feature in the intercourse between English speaking countries and China, if he fore bore to refer at all to the odd lingua franco which was for 80 long the sole medium of communication between the barbarian and the Chinese; and therefore Mr. A. A. Hayes has done well to give a fow reminiscences of the grotesque jargon which furnished so many anecdotes to the Shanghai dinner-table. The January number of Scribner's Monthly, one of the most carefully edited and exquisitely illustrated mag. azines published in the States, contains a paper on Pidgin English which really exhausts the subject. Mr. Hayes was well qualified to write on this theme, and no better collection of "pidgin" stories
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.