the parts of the design intended to be of that
colour, he passed the plate on to his neighbour
who added his colour, and so on all round the
room till the pattern was completely coloured
The result is stiff and mechanical. There is
no attempt at artistic effect, nothing like the
beautiful pictures painted in the factories at
Worcester or Dresden. Dyers and weavers
are numerous. The silk shops are the finest
in the bazaar, but their contents are
excessively dear, and are not very good. Indeed,
the Canton silks are considered by the Chinese
themselves to be inferior to those made in
the northern provinces of the empire. I have
seen silk dresses and pieces from Pekin, brought
into India viâ Nepaul, of a quality which I was
assured by a competent judge could not be
procured at Canton. This was five-and-twenty
years ago, and it is possible that our present
widely different connexion with China may
have introduced a better article into Shanghae,
which is so near Pekin. But the Chinese were
very jealous formerly about exporting their
finest silks, and those I allude to were brought
by the members of a mission, sent every three
years with a tribute from Kathmandoo to the
Emperor of China, as a friendly return present
from the emperor to the Rajah of Nepaul.

The Chinese shopkeepers are fat comfortable-
looking fellows, with pleasant, good-humoured
faces. They showed me their curiosities very
willingly, and none the less courteously
exchanged a smiling "chin-chin" with me, if I
left the shop without purchasing anything.

Tea-shops are numberless. They are piled up
with chests such as we see in England, and with
open baskets of coarse and inferior tea for the
poor. The cheapest kind is made in thin round
cakes or large wafers, strung upon slips of bamboo.
It partially dissolves in hot water, and is
flavoured with salt by those who drink it. Of
this form of brick tea I have never seen any
mention in the books published by travellers.

There are poulterers' shops, with fowls roasted
and raw; and there are vegetable sellers' stalls,
and fish in baskets, dead and not over-fresh, or
alive in large tubs of water. They were all of the
carp family, including réhoos, mïrgals, and kutlas,
so familiarly known in India, also several species
of the siluroids, called vulgarly "catfish." The
fish brought from the sea are salted and
sun-dried, and, with strong aid from immense
festoons of sharks' fins, set up a stench that it is
not easy to walk through.

After inspecting shops and elbowing and
being elbowed in the crowd till afternoon,
when I was ready to drop with heat and
fatigue, my pilot steered me to a small square,
flagged with stone, on which the sun shone
fiercely. He called it "Beggars'-square," and
told me that all the destitute and
abandoned sick in the city, crawled, if they could,
to this spot, because those who died there
received burial at the expense of government.
While he spoke, my eyes were fixed
upon some heaps of dirty tattered clothes on
the ground, which presently began to move,
and I discovered to my horror three miserable
creatures, lean and covered with odious filth,
lying in different stages of their last agony, on
the bare stones, exposed to the burning rays of
the sun. They came here to die, and no one
heeded them, or gave them a drop of water,
or a morsel of food, or even a little shelter
from the noontide glare. I had seen shocking
things of this sort in India, but nothing so
horrible. To ensure a climax of disgusts, my guide
led me straight to a dog butcher's shop,
where several of the nasty fat oily carcases
of those animals were hanging for sale.
They had not been flayed, but dangled there
with their smooth shining skins, which had
been scalded and scraped clean of hair, so that
at first I took them for sucking-pigs. There
were joints of dog, ready roasted, on the
counter, and in the back of the shop were several
cages in which live dogs were quietly sitting,
lolling their tongues out, and appearing very
unconcerned. I saw several cats also, in cages,
looking very demure; and moreover I saw
customers, decorous and substantial-looking
householders, inspect and feel the dogs and cats,
and buy those which they deemed fittest for the
table. The cats did not like being handled, and
mewed loudly. " What cappen think o' that?"
said my guide. " Cappen s'pose never eat dog?
— dog very good, very fat, very soft. Oh, number
one dinner is dog!" " And are cats as
good?" I asked. " Oh, Chinaman chowchow
everything. Chowchow plenty cat. Chinaman
nasty beast, I think, cappen, eh?" My cicerone
had been so long mixed up with European and
American ship captains and missionaries, that
he had learnt to suit his ideas to his company,
if his ideas had not actually undergone great
modification, as is the case in India with those
educated natives of the present day known to
us as specimens of "Young Bengal."

Before quitting the bazaar, I was ushered
into two gambling-shops. These are licensed
by the Chinese government, the owners paying
a considerable tax. Both were tolerably full of
players, and in both the same kind of game
was being played— a simple one enough, if I
understood it. A player staked a pile of cash, or
dollars; the croupier staked a similar one; and
then another member of the establishment
dipped his hand into a bag and drew out a
handful of counters: if they were in even
fours, the bank won; if they were uneven, the
player won, and the croupier's stake was duly
handed over to him— rather ruefully, it struck
me, by the banker, who sat on the counter raised
above the rest. This game appears about as
intrinsically entertaining as pulling straws; but
I may have overlooked or misunderstood parts
of it of a more intellectual nature. In the first
house I visited, the players were of the lower
class, and the stakes were copper cash. One man,
quite a youth, left the room evidently cleaned
out: his look revealed it, and I suppose he went
away to the opium shop, the usual consolation
of a Chinaman under the circumstances. As we
entered the second gambling-house, my guide