To return to the places where the best years of one's life have been spent, to be a transient spectator where once one played even a small part upon the stage, must always be a heart-stirring adventure, fraught with a gentle melancholy of retrospection, half pleasure and half pain. The pain predominates when, amidst the whispering ghosts of the years that are gone, one seeks in vain for the old familiar places, where only a few surviving landmarks greet one like old. friends in a strange land.
The changes which the hand of man has wrought in and about the Foreign Settlements of Shanghai during the past ten years have been as many and as great as those of any mushroom Eldorado of the New World, so that the revenant in search of old haunts wanders here "'like a pelican in the wilderness." On all sides the triumphs of commerce-in-the-grand-manner confront him, imposing manifestations and appliances of noise and haste to the business of barter, more suggestive of Chicago than of the easygoing Shanghai of bygone days. It is as if Aladdin had persuaded every citizen to change his old lamps for new, his ricsha, for a motor-car, and henceforth to live in a fever of transatantic hustle and bustle, All over the East the traveller of to-day will find portents and and proofs of a world of change, but nowhere such a transfiguration, such breathless haste and hunger for new things, such a clean sweep of old signposts, as in the foreign community of Shanghai. Tientsin and Canton, for all their new traffics and discoveries, still preserve the essential features of parison, stands unchanged and their youth. Yokohama, by com-rooted in her ancient ways.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.