English in earnest. On the table were little pieces of
sliced ham, the famous preserved eggs which taste like hard-boiled eggs
and look like dark-colored jelly, and little dishes of sweets, shrimps,
etc. To these we helped ourselves with the chop sticks, though they
insisted on giving us little plates on which they spooned out some of
each. Then followed such a feast as we had never experienced, the boys
taking off one dish after another and replacing them with others in the
center of the table, to which we helped ourselves. There was no special
attempt at display of fine dishes such as you might have expected with
such cooking and such expense, and such as would have happened in Japan.
We had chicken and duck and pigeon and veal and pigeon eggs and soup and
fish and little oysters that grow in the ground (very delicious and
delicate) and nice little vegetables and bamboo sprouts mixed in with
the others, and we had shrimps cooked, and shark's fin and bird's nest
(this has no taste at all and is a sort of very delicate soup, but costs
a fortune and that is its real reason for being). It is gelatine which
almost all dissolves in the cooking. We had many more things than these,
and the boy in a dirty white coat and an old cap on his head passing
round the hot perfumed wet towels every few courses, and for dessert we
had little cakes made of bean paste filled up with almond paste and
other sweets, all very elaborately made, and works of art to look at,
but with too little taste to appeal much to us; then we had fruits,
bananas and apples and pears, cut up in pieces, each with a toothpick in
it so it can be eaten easily. Then we had a soup made of fish's stomach,
or air sac. Then we had a pudding of the most delicious sort imaginable,
made of a mold of rice filled in with eight different symbolic things
that I don't know anything about, but they don't cut much part in the
taste. In serving this dish we were first given a little bowl half full
of a sauce thickened and looking like a milk sauce. It was really made
of powdered almonds. Into this you put the pudding, and it is so good
that I regretted all that had gone before, and I am going to learn how
to make it.

SHANGHAI, May 3.

Some one told us when we were on the boat that the Japanese cared
everything for what people thought of them, and the Chinese cared
nothing. Making comparisons is a favorite, if dangerous, indoor sport.
The Chinese are noisy, not to say b