Feb. 10.
AmoxG ihe hundreds, if not thousands of foreigners who stream up and down the Maloo every day, how many ever stop to examine the windows of the great, reinforced concrete buildings which have all but ousted the wooden shops of ten years ago? Yet those windows are worth some study. Here is one which presses the advantages, in these cold days, of a foreign face cream, A snowy countryside is carefully staged, through the midst of which percolates a half-congealed stream. Beside it vides a mandarin in fur-lined hood and gown, while to the right a peasant pushes a wheelbarrow across a ricketts bridge. Both mandarin and peasant have blobs of the cream on their faces—a comic touch, (perhaps, but one that tells a story. A little farther on another window is dressed with equal elaboration to advertise a certain cigarette, foreign in origin if Chinese in mame. There is a monster model of a famous gateway, with soldiers marching in and out and Chinese gentlemen' taking an afternoon stroll and enjoying a quiet whiff—the whole most entrancingly lighted up with tiny electric globes. Yet a few steps and we find a window given up entirely to wrist watches, scattered about on the slopes and in the crevices of rugged mountains—-rather inappropriately would seem at first: till we remember the connexion between gold and silver and hillside mines. One can purchase a wrist-watch here for as low as four dollars, and certainly in appearance it leaves little to be desired. Space forbids our tellling of other windows, of *he multitudes of hats, umbrellas, great-coats, hosiery, boots and shoes, woollen goods, bicycles. cameras, chemical products and what are known in American stores, we believe, as "'notions''—and all, if not of foreign make, at least foreign in design.
These things, the demand they cultivate and that they already reveal surely indicate a change which we ought not to leave out of calculation in attempting to judge of the course of events in China. The subject is taken up very interestingly in the '"British Chamber of Commerce
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.