Tue question, " Where Shanghai residents are to go or their Summer change?" is becoming harder of solation every year. There is a story told by the Indian traveller Wilson of a certain American backwoodsman, who, on finding some people camping about twenty miles from his log cabin, rushed back in consternation to his wife and exclaimed, "Pack thee up, Martha—pack thee up! Its' getting altogether too crowded hereabouts." The auuoyance which this worthy complained of is generally felt in China. If we are ordered by the Doctor, or driven by ennui to seek a change, we hardly know where to go. The inevitable Chefoo is the first place which occurs, but the change to that " paradise of the waves"—as it is enthusiastically called by some admirer with eligible building lots to dispose of—is, daring July, August, and September, "altogether too crowd-od." Change, if it is to do a person good, must not only be change of climate, it must be change of our society. It is very little use to go toa different place if we meet exactly the same people. When Englishmen take their outing, they strive to find some new scene in which they will be reminded as little as possible of their former surroundings. They seek new resorts every year. Now starting for Sweden and Norway, now trying untrodden Spain, now seeking some new haunt like Davos Platz. The object is to avoid the conventional touriste; that is to say, persons whose minds move in precisely the groove their minds have been moving in for the previous eleven months. Now, if " Shanghai resident goes to Chefoo, he gets no change of society or of conversation. The mind is affected by s long sojourn onamud fiat like Shanghai, Therefore we do not merely require change of air, we require a change of our surround ings, and no such change can be met with in Chinn. Wherever we go there are the same monotonous features, the same squalid houses, the same reeking cities, the same scenes of decay and corruption, If we go to Peking, we only see ruin and neglect written in rather larger characters than elsewhere. Every treaty port las an environment of poverty and degradation which Lao an inexpressibly wenting effect on the spirits, The picture of millions of our fellow creatures living in filth and foulness unspeakable, squeezed and oppressed by the most corrupt officialdom that ever existed, is so hopeless and so monotonous that we cannot experience any relief from moving amidst such scones. This is why it is far wiser, when seeking health, to go to Japan than to go to any sanitarium in China, Th a freshness and a senso of life and movement in Japan which we cannot find in the treaty ports. To be in a country where there are railroads and some signs of enterprise and activity, la @ very important point. Wo feel that we are within sight of the forces of civilization. Besides, there are sources of perpetual pleasure in the art world of Japan, The fashion of the commonest object is picturesque, The graceful shapes and bright colours, the varieties of form or of combination which attract and detain the eyo in every cottage and every costume, in every article of fumilier dso and trinket of personal adornment, contribute to the agreeable distraction of the mind. They take us out of ourselves and make us forget the bodily ailment or the mental vexation, It has been said of Englishmen, and it cor. tainly may be said with trath of the Chinese, that they cannot even hang out a flag gracefully. The reverse applies to the Japanese. They really can do nothing without a certain grace and becomingness which is inherent in their picturesque nature, We may add to considerations which some will call "sentimental," the very practical ous of the superiority of the accommodation which is provided for visitors to Japan to that which is obtainable at present at any port in China, The hotels at Kobe and Yokohama are excellent. It follows, they, that when, to quote Heine, some "sou ut Aisculapius having ex-Lansted is skill upon his patient, sends him to a spa with a long prescription of treatment, which is nothing else
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.