our amiable inquiry as to how the barbarians pass their time, when not
employed in affairs of commerce or in worshipping their ancestors, has
inspired me to examine the matter more fully. At the same time your
pleasantly-composed aphorism that the interior nature of persons does
not vary with the colour of their eyes, and that if I searched I should
find the old flying kites and the younger kicking feather balls or
working embroidery, according to their sex, does not appear to be
accurately sustained.

The lesser ones, it is true, engage in a variety of sumptuous
handicrafts, such as the scorching of wooden tablets with the semblance
of a pattern, and gouging others with sharpened implements into a crude
relief; depicting birds and flowers upon the surface of plates, rending
leather into shreds, and entwining beaten iron, brass, and copper into a
diversity of most ingenious complications; but when I asked a maiden of
affectionate and domesticated appearance whether she had yet worked her
age-stricken father's coffin-cloth, she said that the subject was one
upon which she declined to jest, and rapidly involving herself in a
profuse display of emotion, she withdrew, leaving this one aghast.

To enable my mind to retranquillise, I approached a youth
of highly-gilded appearance, and, with many predictions of
self-inferiority, I suggested that we should engage in the stimulating
rivalry of feather ball. When he learned, however, that the diversion
consisted in propelling upwards a feather-trimmed chip by striking it
against the side of the foot, he candidly replied that he was afraid
he had grown out of shuttle-cock, but did not mind, if I was vigorously
inclined, "taking me on for a set of yang-pong."

Old men here, it is said, do not fly kites, and they affect to despise
catching flies for amusement, although they frequently go fishing.
Struck by this peculiarity, I put it in the form of an inquiry to one
of venerable appearance, why, when at least five score flies were
undeniably before his eyes, he preferred to recline for lengthy periods
by the side of a stream endeavouring to snare creatures of whose
existence he himself had never as yet received any adequate proof.
Doubtless in my contemptible ignorance, however, I used some word
inaccurately, for those who stood around suffered themselves to become
amused, and the one in question replied with no pretence of amiable
condescension that the jest had already been bette