To the Editor of the "Norta-Cuina Dairy News."
Sir,—It is mightily refreshing to read Mr. Rodney Gilbert's hearty onslaught on those Western writers who, in their abysmal ignorance of things Chinese, take pride and pleasure (and profit) in gulling an innocent reading public with impossible and blatant absurdities phew the Chinese and Chinese life.
These nonsensical concoctions remind one forcibly of the old geography books, wherein a Chinese man was invariably depicted as a creature in strange garments, with a silk sash round his waist, into which were stuck a knife and a pair of chop-sticks. He had the invariable oblique almond eyes and eyebrows with a fearful pitch like a toboggan slide, a pair of moustache dependent from just beneath his nostrils like two- rats' tails, and then the queue—that was the chef d'euvre: it started somewhere about the middle of the crown, and it lumped and curled down, "with meat in it," as a friend of mine used to say, a fleshy-looking appendage, hence, I suppose, the appellation " pig tail,"
Even to-day, in English fiction magazines of good class, one may find this humbugging pictorial presentment still being perpetuated. Tf, happily, the artist has been
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.