well as the palate, and while we fully
realised our inability to delight our guests with such beauty as that to
which they were accustomed, we did our best. Salmon is a great asset,
being decorative as well as tasty, and only the hard-pressed know the
many uses of a tin of sardines. Jelly is a certain success, and the last
plum-pudding from home, cut into dice and blazing in a blue flame, looks
mysteriously clever. A bottle of cochineal is worth its weight in gold
on such occasions, and the _piece montee_, which none but an expert
could have recognised as spinach, beetroot, carrot, and yam tinted pink,
would have done no discredit to Benoist. The novelty of handling spoon
and fork, and even so dangerous a weapon as a knife, did much to enhance
the pleasure of the meal.

The conversation was now much more intimate than on the earlier
occasions, and both sides felt free to ask questions on matters which
had excited curiosity. "Does the sun ever shine in your country?" asked
the _Tai-tai_. "I have heard that England is a land of shades." "When I
left my home in Szechwan I was very homesick. Are you?" inquired another
lady, but before I could reply, her companion answered for me: "The
ability of these ladies is so great that they would be incapable of such
feelings." A guest of their own, who had spent much time in Shanghai,
was thoroughly conversant with foreign dress and manners; she described
the former with great originality, but admitted that even she was
baffled by one thing: "The spotted webbing with which foreign ladies
cover their face, is it worn for purposes of concealment or as an aid to
the eyesight?" My answer that it served to keep the hair in place
carried no conviction, for she had already remarked that though combs
are so much in evidence in the foreign woman's coiffure, she seemingly
makes little use of them!

The conversation turned to the subject of a proclamation recently issued
which forbade the binding of children's feet: "Alas, the people of China
are not so easily governed as those of your honourable country,"
lamented the chief _Tai-tai_. "The Mandarin finds it impossible to
enforce this one order, whilst he read in last week's paper that in
England a man is imprisoned for refusing to send his child to school,
for omitting to vaccinate it, and the article even stated that a parent
is punished for refusing to call a doctor to see a sick child, even if
it be a girl; but the newspapers are full of