Wim altogether unaccustomed humility the Saturday Review has sat down at the feet of a book just published under the title of "From Pekin to Calais by land." "The reader," says the Reviewer, "yillbedeeply grateful for much valuable information and for the rectification of many errors in which the public have hitherto dwelt with complacent content." Even if we had not yet seen the book, such is the natural authority with which a Saturday Reviewer is invested that we should have been been quite prepared to believe and be grateful, if only the Reviewer had disdained particulars. Unfortunately his enthusiasm leads him to give a specimen of the valuable information, and it is a specimen which, with all the goodwill in the world, we find a desperately tough morsel to swallow.
"We will draw attention," he says, "to the author's observ: onthe origin and utility of pigtails. They were introduced "into China by the Tartars, who, as Mohamedaus, required that the conquered race should shave their heads in Mohamedan fashion, leaving only the small tuft of hair by which the Faithful are supposed to be drawn up to heaven when they die. The Chinese, artistic in all they do, converted the ridiculous sh i the thick tail w man's greatest delight and pride. It is! also a most suitable headgear for Peki where, in spite of continual brushing a European's hair is always filled with dust."
The Manchus are as accustomed to be called Tartars as we foreigners to be called devils, but the most outrageous Taiping never went so far as to call them Mohammedans. As for the artistic proclivities of the Chinese—but indeed the whole statement is so amazing that the foreigner in China will doubt as he reads it the evidence of his eyes, while as for the Rev. John Ross and other authorities on the Manchu Conquest, they will be quite unfitted for any serious investigations for some time to come. marvel is how the author became possessed of this wouderful information, and how the superior Saturday Review was brought in al soberness to endorse and applaud it. The resident of China is not given to
though he may, and frequently' does pulling the legs' of his visitor, and (being of a hospitable turn of mind) take a stranger in, he never, it is needless to say, imposes upon him. We cannot fora moment then, admit the supposition that Mr, de Windt is the victim of a too imaginative host. Has he by any chance mixed the Manchu conquest of China with the Mahomedan invasions of India and confounded the philistinian Chinese with their really artistic neighbours of Japan? Or is he anxious to add to the many brilliant theories about them enunciated late years in Europe, such as their discovery of America or the excellence of their institutions and government? He will not find it easy to cut out either Mr. Leland or M. Simon, but at any rate he will be believed, at home. Why, we saw one of M. Simon's most fantastic fables (the incorruptibility of the mandarins, or Chinese kindness to animals, we forget which) quoted seriously iv a home paper the other day, and used to point a moral. Yet Mr. de Windt, one can't help thinking and regretting, ingenious as he is has missed his opportunity. Surely he could, while he was about it, have worked in the lost Ten Tribes. They didn't, it is true, (at least the Tubingen school think not) wear ridiculous tufts, but then the North American Indian does, and every schoolboy knows that he is a lost Ten Tribesman. And Mr. Leland says that a North American Indian is to All intents and purposes a Chinaman a few times removed, and—but the whole theory might have been worked out so nicely, yet Mr. de Windt has spoilt it all by calling his Tartars Mohammedans.
His other idea of the beauty and utility of a pigtail does not seem to us to be sound either. Given a native of substance, a flowered silk jacket of pale pink or mauve, and a luxuriant pigtail, and the whole does not suggest canty. For one thing, the pigtail, there's no denying it, will. not keep clean, and ought in our opinion to be invariably provided with an antimacasser, or, better still, with an umbrella cover of some oil-resisting fabric. The best part of a good pigtail is undoubtly the end of it, but that is because it is made up at that point of anything rather than hair. Still even three bloc! silk tassels bobbing below an elegant jacket do not compensate for a widening streak of grease above it, and that is what, sooner or later, and sooner rather than' later, it comes to. As for utility, yes, pigtails are useful, but hardly to their owner, except perhaps in the Straits Settlements. There, it is said, the wily Chinee who is for some reason wanted in " hurry by the police rather flaunts his pigtail, as he removes himself from the scene, than endeavours to avoid giving the enemy so splendid a handle. The reason is that the queues of Straits rascaldom are either remoyable at pleasure, like a lizard's tail, or are so plentifully besprinkled with odds and ends of glass as to be anything but pleasant to hold. Therefore a policeman now-a-days sees no advantage in skirmishing after the tail, but directs, his attention to the body of the enemy. In connection with this subject of pigtails and police, it has always seemed to us an error in policy to cut off, by way of punishment, a convict's tail. It is as much as to say that your respectable and honest. man wears a pigtail while your vagabond does not. Now the foreigner does not. Of course it isn't necessary, as it certainly is not logical, to conclude that because all vagabonds' pigtails are cut off, and because no foreigner wears one, that therefore all foreigners are vagabonds. Still among a people so eminently illogical as the Chinese the experiment is a little dangerous. The vexed question of the treatment to be accorded to British pigtails of Chinese descent we cannot enter upon. They at least are a source of joy and profit to their possessor, who with their aid can rival the bat in the fable, and be Britisher or Chinee, as may best serve his turn for the time. Pigtails are useful in other and mysterious ways into which it would be profane to intrude. For are they not to an increasing extent an article of export? It is improbable that there is such a thing as a pigtail harvest at all corresponding to the hair harvest of Brittany, since the modern Chinaman, for good and sufficient reasons, would view with dismay the loss of his queue. It is not, as Mr. de Windt would have us suppose, because it is his greatest delight and pride, but because its absence would make him unpleasantly conspicuous and probably lead to his arrest as a rebel, when explanations would be costly if not painful. f course a Chinaman of culture (of Chinese culture, it is understood) likes to keep his pigtail in good condition, and even bestow some attentions on it. Pao-vii, the hero of the Hung-lou-meng, used to thread his with pearls, but that was in his frivolous youth, when the late Mr. Gutzlaff mistook bim for a girl, As a rule any unusual appearance on or about a Chinaman's hair is not intended by the wearer as an ornament. One of Mr. de Windt's predecessor's fell into this error.
He observed that the hotel what the poetic and the prosaic a sweep's besom, stretch-
Phe poor youth merely intended to ing from ear to ear in front of the i tail. make his queue fuller, and with that end in view was letting his hair grow. But what the globe-trotter noted in his diary was: "I am waited on by a youn; celestial whose hair has been arrang with great picturesqueness. [Here he described the general effect: he called it an aureole, not a besom). He tells ime that he is to be married next month, and it is evident that he has adopted this coiffure, because he finds that in it he is most attractive in the eyes of his lady-love."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.