Stave First. Three mouths after reaching China, (He is disgusted with it.) What do I think of China? T. thin! any mental reservation, that it is odious. I never saw anywhere such hills, and such interminable successions of uninteresting plains. There is nothing tu please the eye, to attract the ear, to gratify the taste, or even to awaken curiosi-
most exactly alike, except upon a more All the Chinese that I have seen louk careful inspection than I desire. They all dress exactly alike, except that some are more than others, and others less so. They all talk, or rather jabber, precisely alike, and seem to think that I can comprehend their volubilities if they are only shouted at me! What a disappointment Peking is! It is simply unspeakable, and the wonder of it is, that each Chit nese city is said to be worse than others no matter where you begin to reckon, or which way you count! I am so tired of having strangers come and k'o t'vw to me, or at any rate perpetrate a most profound salaam, as if their arrival marked an epoch in contemporaneous history. Why can't they let me alone, as I let m alone? Who ever heard of such an fistic excuse for a language? It lacks everything that it ought to have, and has everything that a tongue ought to lack, and there is no sense mit. I amour ofall patience trying to make a vehicle of speech out of such an invertebrate jelly. And what an expensive country after all! Chinese things may be cheap enough, to the Chinese but then no foreigner wants most Chinese things, and those that we must have are loaded with triple prices before we get them. And it is even worse with foreign articles. Dry goods, newspaper subscriptions, and steamer-fares are the highest in the world. What does one get for his money, when it is gone? What a strange odds-and-ends is it that is called *society'! Where did we ever seo anything like it? It is not at all like
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.