5th Sept. Tue first question that, for some occult reason, an old resident here feels constrained to put to a new arrival is, What do you think of China? If he be of a literary turn the old resident may urge the griffin to commit to paper (but, as the editor says, "not necessarily for publication ") his first impressions: since he will quickly lose the power of receiving any impressions at all. But when ten years or so of life in China the gviftin, now in his turn an old. resident, revisits his native land, do any of his home-keeping friends ever ask him what he thinks of England? He is conscious at first of more bewilderment than he cares to confess, even to himself; but does it occur to him to analyse it, much less to write it down for the benefit of other time-expired residents? Yet we venture to believe that more moral profit (if anybody nowadays cares for that) and possibly not less awusemeut, may be found in the returned traveller's first forty-eight hours of England than in his early experiences of China.
If he could be taken up, not from the luxury of this Model Settlement, but from some modest outport, and set down, suddenly in a minute, in Regent Street or Whitehall, the change would be more abrupt of course than when a six weeks' voyage intervenes, but not necessarily more striking. The last place touched at has probably been Port Said, between which and its inhabitants is a resem-blanco, or a difference, which may be summed up thus: Port Said is a lowing place with straight ways, the Port jose are a low-lying people with ways by no means straight. It must be then (we as patriotic Britons are bound to affirm) that our traveller will not have found Port Said much of a rent even for Gravesend and the ondon Docks, much less Westminster and the City. a matter of fact, so we are assured, the first point noticed by the newly landed (as soon as he has escaped the clutches of the Customs) is the extraordinary preponderance of foreigners, meaning of course by " foreigners" Europeans. Concomitantly with this is the strange feeling that nobody is staring at him, nobody calling him a foreign devil, or pressing round to see what he and his clothes are made of. This, which in China he would have regarded as a blessed relief, he now feels almost inclined to resent. Certainly to most minds distinction, even uncomfortable distinction, is preferable to obscurity, and no one accustomed to yells of yang-kwei-dza and an_ ever-increasing fume of malodorous Chinamen can find himself for the first time lost in a crowd of perfectly incurious Europeans without a shock to his sense of self-importance. For in London at any rate they are incurious. Even the sight on what they call a sultry July day of a yellow-faced being ina straw hat and ulster, carrying a baby over Holborn Viaduct and followed by an amah in her native costume, hardly moves then. They seem to have no time to spare for curiosity of this kind. That, again, is a thing which at once strikes our returned resident. Everyone is in a hurry, and trains and other public cdn= voyances leave within five minutes or so of their scheduled time. He thinks regretfully of the days when he could always ensure an hour's delay in the departure of the steamer by inveigling the captain to tifin, and when quarters of an hour were of less consequence than seconds seem to be at home. One advantage, hor ever, this time-saving spirit of theirs has, he finds, secured to, him: telegrams can be sent anyivhere within the ivgdom for the ridiculous sum of a halfpenny a word. The consequence is that for the first week or two he revels ju telegrams; he has a childish joy in despatching them; moreover they spare him what he grudges much more than time, bother. We may confess it to ourselves, we are lotus-eaters here—or would be, one and all, if fate allowed. How admirably we contrive to escape trouble! When we return to China, do we have to obsequiously wait upon some customs examiner, and stand in a droughty shed while he scornfully overhauls our family linen, or, worse still, tells us cavalierly to stay till our tum comes, an hour or two hence? Do we have to struggle for cabs, puzzle over Bradshaws, wear out our souls by anxious thought for luggage, ruin our digestions by hurried meals at railway stations Not a bit of it. We land and tell the compradore topass thosesomany personal effects through an obliging custom-house, the officers at which do not treat us as smugglers until we are proved innocent, and we sit down to tifin at ow hong or elsewhere with the comfortable convic~ tion (if we think about it at all) that everything is going right. Those compradores aul their coolies, owr boy and his underlings, much as we may rail at them here, how they are missed at home! There you caimot rail at anyone (save in those rare cases where railing is in the contract, to be paid for by higher wages) without suffering for it in some way. A-servant in England exacts as much consideration as a maiden aunt with a fortune to leave; and the cook (strange to say, a female cook,—the femininity of the domestics is another, and a somewhat embarrassing, feature) would give notice at once if you brought in half-a dozen unexpected guests to dinner. People in a London street do not know their next-door neighbours, who would certainly resent the casual borrowing of glass and crockery sanctioned by our more free and easy system. In consequence every housekeeper must be, like Priestman's Patent rodgers, self-contained, and life, we feel, lacks the charm of neighbour ly iuterdependence with which it is invested at a sociable outport here.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.