es with whom he was
thrown in contact to eat a whole leg of mutton every day for dinner;
and a high native functionary, complaining one day of some tipsy
sailors who had been rioting on shore, observed that "he knew
foreigners always got drunk on Sundays, and had the offence been
committed on that day he would have taken no notice of it; but," &c.,
&c. They have vague notions that filial piety is not considered a
virtue in the West, and look upon our system of contracting marriages
as objectionable in the extreme. They think foreigners carry whips and
sticks only for purposes of assault, and we met a man the other day
who had been wearing a watch for years, but was in the habit of never
winding it up till it had run down. This we afterwards found out to be
quite a common custom among the Chinese, it being generally believed
that a watch cannot be wound up whilst going; consequently, many
Chinamen keep two always in use, and it is worth noticing that watches
in China are almost invariably sold in pairs. The term "foreign devil"
is less frequently heard than formerly, and sometimes only for the
want of a better phrase. Mr Alabaster, in one of his journeys in the
interior, was politely addressed by the villagers as _His Excellency
the Devil_. The Chinese settlers in Formosa call themselves "foreign
men," but they call us "foreign things;" for, they argue, if we called
you foreign men, what should we call ourselves? The _Shun-pao_
deserves much credit for its unvarying use of _western_ instead of
_outside_ nations when speaking of foreign powers, but the belief is
still very prevalent that we all come from a number of small islands
scattered round the coast of one great centre, the Middle Kingdom.

And so we might go on multiplying _ad nauseam_ instances of Chinese
ignorance in trivial matters which an ably-conducted journal has it in
its power to dispel. We are so dissimilar from the Chinese in our ways
of life, and so unlike them in dress and facial appearance, that it is
only many years of commercial intercourse on the present familiar
footing which will cause them to regard us as anything but the
barbarians they call us. Red hair and blue eyes may make up what Baron
Hubner would euphemistically describe as the "beau type d'un gentleman
anglais," but when worn with a funny-shaped hat, a short coat, tight
trousers, and a Penang lawyer, the picture produced on the retina of a
Chinese mind is unmistakably that of a "foreign