knowing the advantage of increasing the attractions of his place, may procure a tolerably skillful cook and open a restaurant in an upper story of his building; but at first this will only be kept open on Sundays and holidays.

Other opportunities for making money will not be lost sight of. The cellar will be fitted up with bunks for opium smoking, and tables covered with matting for the convenience of those who desire to play dominoes; and the profit on the opium consumed and the portion of the winnings set aside for the use of the tables soon constitute a more important source of revenue than the store itself.

Thus many interests besides those of the dealer in clothes and provisions grow up under the roof of the little shop. Often a doctor, some poor and broken-down student, dispenses medicines from a supply of drugs ranged along one side of the store; the itinerant barber, an indispensable personage, makes it a place of call; letters for the colony are directed in care of the store; public notices are written on tablets of red paper and pasted beside the door; Chinese newspapers, both of San Francisco and the native ports, are received; and here, too, interpreters are to be found, who conduct negotiations and adjust differences with the outside world.

As the colony increases in numbers, a kind of society reorganizes, and though at first it may have been composed of laborers engaged as laundrymen or cigar-makers, many of them in time find other employments tributary to the mass, and take up their former occupations or new ones most congenial to them. The modifications and divergences of this society from that of the Chinese at home, due to the absence of native women and the influence of the different and aggressive civilization around it, present an interesting field for study.

Time will not permit me to dwell upon even the characteristic features of the social life of the Chinese in our cities, but there are certain questions connected with their mental characteristics and religious belief which a somewhat prolonged contact with those people enables me, more or less imperfectly, to answer.

Much misconception exists as to character of the Chinese who emigrate to America. They are generally described as the dregs of their people, given up to gambling and opium smoking and distinguished only by their vices. Some, however, who have observed their constant toil, the readiness with which they accept instruction in our language, and their willingness to profess a belief in such religious teaching as is at the same time offered to them, have greatly exaggerated their moral and mental qualities; while others who have questioned them, in the spirit of philosophical inquiry, concerning their religious belief and their knowledge of Confucius and the sages of antiquity, usually in terms quite unintelligible to them, have declared that the popular opinion as to their ignorance is well founded, and that they have little in common with the class of scholars and philosophers who have dignified and adorned the pages of Chinese history from the dawn of their civilization down to the present time.

Nearly all the Chinese in America have passed some of their early years at school, where they learned to write a few of the many characters of their language, and to read it with more or less facility. This is the case even among the Sinning people, few of whom go up at home to the district examinations, and among whom, even in China, there are few literary graduates or persons of distinction—a condition due not so much to their lack of natural ability, as to the extreme and grinding poverty to which they are subjected.

Among those from Hohshan and the country adjacent to the city of Canton are found many of considerable attainments; not men who would be considered scholars at home, or who have even obtained the degree of