Once again there is cause for re-Joleing over the fact that Shanghai essentially a sporting com: munity that it is diffeult to fi any gathering, whatever its main purpose, in which sportsmen are not in the majority. The sportsmen on the Municipal Council again have taken a firm stand with regard ito the indiscriminate slaughter of pheasants and they deserve all congratulations. Perhaps it may seem strange for a newspaper one day to urge the thinning-out of one species of feathered life and the next be strong in advocacy of the protection of another species. But crows are over-plentiful: phear sants are not. The Chinese Market Stallholders Association, the members of which of course are interested in the pheasant only as a dead and saleable bird, pleaded with the Municipal Council to remove the four-year-old restriction on the sale of hen pheasants, arguing that hens now are numerous but cocks fare scarce. That assertion might impress people who would not know the difference between a pheasant and a teal except by the taste, or pointer and a setter unless they could remember which had a long coat, but there are sportsmen on the Council, hence the neat and all-sufficient reply:—"If the hen birds are numerous, there can be reasonable expectation that there will soon be a sufficiency of cock birds, bpt if hen birds also become searce, there will be neither eceks nor hens to come to market." 'The only thing that remained to be done the Council has done—to publish again the notification prohibiting' the sale of hen pheasants for of pheasants denuded of their feathers, The Brass Band The Chinese brass band, a pro-duet of modern China, has come to play a prominent part in the Flowery Republic of to-day. Its omnipresence in Shanghai, especially during the present autumn sales, perhaps a little degrading to so high an art, but only goes to show the much lamented trend towards: 'a commerctalization of art. The Frequent presence of a brass band the rendering of up-to-date funeral rites, however, strikes the Western observer with a slight sense of inappropriateness, though this is doubtless a lack of appreciation on our part. One cannot help feeling nevertheless that the older Chinese rites with their strange instruments of solemn tone were more truly in keeping with, the gravity. of such an occasion.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.