Caantes Lane in his Essays of El somewhere says:—"Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever: lays one down without a feeling of disappoint. mont." This is exactly our own ase with respect to our Yokohama contemporaries. Their files—especially when there is nothing stirring to write about—are received with eagerness, glanced at with curiosity, and Inid down with disappointment. Bach week as they come to hand by the Japan mail, they are found to be more and more barren of news. The files received on Thura-'FA day are made up principally of extracts, some of which are acknowledged, whilst great part of them are not. As long og readers and subscribers do not complain, it matters very little to outsiders how free a use is made of the paste and scissors by our confreres in Japan, though we cannot help thinking a little more discretion in their employment would not be out of place, For instance, the infliction of stale witticisms from American papers might be spared serio-comic articles on cats can scarcely be in request; hash-ups of Bret Harte, Mark Twain, eto, are apt to grow tire. some; and old sermons of Dr. Talmage which have gone the rounds of dozens of papers look rather out of place side by side with dissertations on silk, prices current and rates of exchange. We never heard that the foreign community of Yokohama was essentially a chess-playing one; yet the Japan Weekly Mail regularly serves up n problem in one issue and its solution in the next, Bat this, after all, is no more than might be expected from a paper which. only very recently edified its readers with a series of learned and moral dissertations on the game of poker.
Such original matter as the Yokohama papers contain is but dry reading at the best. A few months ago, when the silk war was being most desperately. waged between. native dealers and foreign merchants, the Japan Gazette espoused the cause of the latter, and for weeks at a stretch scarcely had a word to say on any other sub. ject. Take up any issue of the paper, look in whatever column we might, there it was, silk, silk, silk, and nothing else. And what after all was the result? Only a compromise, After about two months' hard fighting the garrison which had been so enthasiastically defended by the Gazette sur. rendered at discretion, and conceded almost every point against which our contemporary had contended. Since then the Japan Gazette has expatiated nauseam on the Treaty Revision, not to mention that for years it has La. poured under " disease which may be termed free trade on the brain. The Japan Herald may be sound enough in its views, but its utterauces—whenever it takes the trouble to say anything, which is not. often—afford curious examples of what Mark Twain would call dislocated grammar and decem. posed composition. The Japan Weekly
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.