It was a curious sensation to be taking tickets for our first railway journey in China; and then to start from the Shanghai station, in a comfortable, well-appointed, corridor carriage, We were on a sight-secing excursion, and alighted one station short of the Woo-fung Terminus, proceeding thence toa huge, tent-shaped erection of matting close. by, to find therein, not as its appearance suggested, x circus or a wild-beast show, but Buddha and Kuanyin, the Goddess of Mercy, in the form of marble images. Side by' side, rising several feet high, framed in two gaudy, scarlet and yellow shrines, squatted the placid-looking couple, grotesquely _ill-proportioned; though the fine white stone of which they were sculptured, and the not undignified calm of their countenances, lent a certain comeliness to the exhibition. Their marble drapery was decorated throughout with a border of tinsel and jewels the latter all spurious, with the exception of several carbuncles, presented we were told by Indian devotees; for the chief interest attaching to these images lies in the fact that they have been brought from India, and were manufactured at Qudh of a specially valuable marble quarried there.
Three years ago_an old Buddhist priest named Wei-Kun, "Foundation of Wisdom," dwelling in the sacred island of Pootoo, on the China coast, undertook a pilgrimage to India to collect funds from his coreligionists in that land and by the way, especially in Burma, for the restoration We have all experienced the pleasure of listening to a good song sung by a good. singer, and we have all experienced the disappointment caused by listening to a ace song sung by an indifferent performer. We have also, most of us, felt the various degrees of modified pleasure, or perhaps of modified disappointment, caused by the singing of those who are neither good singers, nor entirely bad ones; those singers who, whether professional or amateur, have in some way failed to reach the excellence in performance necessary to ensure entire satisfaction to the listener but who, nevertheless, have arrived, by their own methods and in their various styles, at certain points of excellence certain points of merit, even though mixed with defects, which give satisfaction, qualified though it may be, to the audience.
Vocalists, whether professional or amateur, may be divided into three classes. The first, which practically consist: entirely of professionals, is composed of those singers whom public opinion has placed in the first rank. At the other end of the vocal world is the third class, which may be said to consist entirely of amateurs. This class is formed of those who, from inability, entirely fail to please the listener; it is a compatatively small class, because its members asa rule gradually drop away, and abandon the art of singing, partly from lack of encouragement and partly from conviction of incapacity. Between these two extremes stands the second class; that vast body of vocalists, professional and amateur, of varying capacities and abilities. There is ne hard and fast line between the three classes; a very superior performer in the
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.