0th March. In is strange in this prosaic China how thin the veil is that divides. the living from the deal. Perhaps missly have not made enough of th most instinctive perception of immortality by their would-be converts; possibly they object to certain of its developments. For if mau is by nature good, as the San-tze-ching atinms, kuei—or wan ati—is too often the reverse.
Auei is both malicious and ious, and unless properly treated prove a source of smmoyznee and expense to his relatives still in the flesh, From this peculiarity of his, two results naturally follow: the Awei is properly treated—that is, he gets his allowance and more than his allowance of paper money and prostrations; and a fixed conviction forms itself in the wind of every observant youth that next to Ibeing a mandarin in this world it is best to be a Awei in the next. Particu-{larly is the lesson taken to heart by the jdanghters of the family. hey have {no chance of becoming mandarins, but they can at any time become huei, and haunt their mothers-in-law or other objectionable personages. Not only indeed will those personages be vexed by ghostly visitations, but they are placed in peril of the law, 'I'o drive another to commit suicide is a capital afieuce in' China, and to be acquitted of a capital charge is almost as bad as to be convicted, so ruivously expen lis it. Where the suicide has ey iso much his, or her, own way, it is not ito be wondered at that Solo-de-se "is
forthcoming—they never are in this popular. Statistics of course are not land of ch'a-pu-to, ' there or thereabouts'—but some idea of the exceeding prevalence of the practice can be yethered translators have not always, more's the pity, felt sufficient interest. in this particular Chinese characteristic to note {every case of self-slaughter reported to the throne, Still in the nineteen or twenty years during which their translations have appeared in our columns Jenough of such cases have been noted to. draw conclusions sufficiently sound concerning the methods and motives of Chinese suicide.
Out of sixty-seven instances in which the method of the act is described, 28 are ascribed to poison, 14 to hanging, 11 to drowning, 9 to cutting or stabbing, 2 to starvation, and one each to shooting, leaping from a height, and dashing the head against a wall, The poison in seven cases is stated to be opium, and in six to be gold in some form. One woman poisoned herself with brine, another with face powder. Of the remaining ten or eleven cases one is set down to arsenic, the others to "poison" generally, Opium is deserve edly popular, as it easily.procured—a soldier sentenced to be flogged swallows some "left over from last night's eutertaiumeut,'"—comparatively painless, and
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.