e tyrant. Father,
mother, uncles, aunts, and grandparents are all made to do his bidding.
In case any of them seems to be recalcitrant, the little dear lies down
on his baby back on the dusty ground and kicks and screams until the
refractory parent or nurse has repented and succumbed, when he get up
and good-naturedly goes on with his play and allows them to go about
their business. The child is t'ao ch'i.

This disposition is general and not confined to any one rank or grade
in society, if we may credit the stories that come from the palace
regarding the present young Emperor Kuang Hsu. When a boy he very much
preferred foreign to Chinese toys, and so the eunuchs stocked the
palace nursery with all the most wonderful toys the ingenuity and
mechanical skill of Europe had produced. As he grew older the toys
became more complicated, being in the form of gramophones,
graphophones, telephones, phonographs, electric lights, electric cars,
cuckoo clocks, Swiss watches and indeed all the great inventions of
modern times. The boy was t'ao ch'i, and the eunuchs say that if he
were thwarted in any of his undertakings, or denied anything he very
much desired, he would dash a Swiss watch, or anything else he might
have in his hand, to the floor, breaking it into atoms; and as there
was no chance of using the rod there was no way but to spoil the child.

It is amusing to listen to the women in a Chinese home when a baby
comes. If the child is a boy the parents are congratulated on every
hand because of the "great happiness" that has come to their home. If
it is a girl, and there are more girls than boys in the family, the old
nurse goes about as if she had stolen it from somewhere, and when she
is congratulated, if congratulated she happens to be, she says with a
sigh and a funereal face, "Only a 'small happiness'--but that isn't
bad."

When a child is born it is considered one year old, and its years are
reckoned not from its birthdays but from its New Year's days. If it has
the good fortune to be born the day before two days old it is reckoned
two years old being one year old when born and two years old on its
first New Year's day.

The first great event in a child's life occurs when it is one month
old. It is then given its first public reception. Its head is shaved
amid kicking and screaming, its mother is up and around where she can
receive the congratulations of her friends, its grandmother is the
honored guest of the occ