ica next year to finish up. They
go all around, largely to small colleges and the Middle West state
institutions, a good many to Tech and a number to Stevens, though none
go to Columbia, because it is in a big city; just what improvement
Hoboken is I don't know. China is full of Columbia men, but they went
there for graduate work. No doubt it is wise keeping them away from a
big city at first. Except for the instruction in Chinese, the teaching
is all done in English, and the boys seem to speak English quite well
already. It's a shame the way they will be treated, the insults they
will have to put up with in America before they get really adjusted. And
then when they get back here they have even a worse time getting
readjusted. They have been idealizing their native land at the same time
that they have got Americanized without knowing it, and they have a hard
time to get a job to make a living. They have been told that they are
the future saviors of their country and then their country doesn't want
them for anything at all--and they can't help making comparisons and
realizing the backwardness of China and its awful problems. At the same
time at the bottom of his heart probably every Chinese is convinced of
the superiority of Chinese civilization--and maybe they are right--three
thousand years is quite a spell to hold on.

You may come over here some time in your life, so it will do no harm to
learn about the money--_about_ it, nobody but the Chinese bankers ever
learn it. There are eleven dimes in a dollar and six twenty-cent pieces,
and while there are only eleven coppers in a dime, there are one hundred
and thirty-eight in a dollar. Consequently the thrifty always carry a
pound or two of big coppers with them to pay 'ricksha men with. Then
there are various kinds of paper money. We are going to Western Hills
tomorrow night, and under instructions I bought some dollars at
sixty-five cents apiece which are good for a whole dollar on this
railway and apparently nowhere else. On the contrary, the foreigners are
done all the time at the hotels; there they only give you five
twenty-cent pieces in change for a dollar, and so on--but they are run
by foreigners, and not by the wily Chinese. One thing you will be glad
to know is that Peking is Americanized to the extent that we have ice
cream at least once a day, two big helpings. This helps.

A word to the wise. Never ask a Chinese whether it is going to rain, or
any other qu