to which he is not accustomed at home.

The people will consist almost entirely of men; they will all wear their
hair plaited in queues; and they will all be exactly alike.

The seclusion of women causes the traveller least surprise of the three,
being a custom much more rigorously enforced in other Oriental
countries; and directly he gets accustomed to the uniform absence of
beard and moustache, he soon finds out that the Chinese people are not
one whit more alike facially than his own countrymen of the West.

A Chinaman cannot wear a beard before he is forty, unless he happens to
have a married son. He also shaves the whole head with the exception of
a round patch at the back, from which the much-prized queue is grown.

There are some strange misconceptions as to the origin and meaning of
the queue, more perhaps on the other side of the Atlantic, where we are
not so accustomed to Chinamen as you are in America. Some associate the
queue with religion, and gravely state that without it no Chinaman could
be hauled into Paradise. Others know that queues have only been worn by
the Chinese for about two hundred and fifty years, and that they were
imposed as a badge of conquest by the Manchu-Tartars, the present rulers
of China. Previous to 1644 the Chinese clothed their bodies and dressed
their hair in the style of the modern Japanese,--of course I mean those
Japanese who still wear what is wrongly known as "the beautiful native
dress of Japan,"--wrongly, because as a matter of fact the Japanese
borrowed their dress, as well as their literature, philosophy, and early
lessons in art, from China. The Japanese dress is the dress of the Ming
period in China, 1368-1644.

It remains still to be seen whence and wherefore the Manchu-Tartars
obtained this strange fashion of the queue.

The Tartars may be said to have depended almost for their very existence
upon the horse; and in old pictures the Tartar is often seen lying
curled up asleep with his horse, illustrating the mutual affection and
dependence between master and beast. Out of sheer gratitude and respect
for his noble ally, the man took upon himself the form of the animal,
growing a queue in imitation of the horse's tail.

Unsupported by any other evidence, this somewhat grotesque theory would
fall to the ground. But there _is_ other evidence, of a rather striking
character, which, taken in conjunction with what has been said, seems to
me to settle the matter.

Off