an imaginary pinch, and returns the box to its owner. To seem to notice that the box is empty would not be "good form," but by compliance with the proper usages the "face" of the host is saved, and all is according to well-settled precedent. In many important particulars it is not otherwise with the Chinese. The life may have long departed, but there remains the coral reef, the avenues to which, in order to avoid shipwreck, must be diligently respected.
The fixed resolution to do certain acts in certain ways, and in no other, is not peculiar to China. The coolies in India habitually carried burdens upon their heads, and applied the same principle to the removal of earth for railways. When the contractors substituted wheelbarrows, the coolies merely transferred the barrows to the tops of their skulls. The coolies in Brazil carry burdens in the same way as those of India. A foreign gentleman in the former country gave a servant a letter to be posted, and was surprised to see him put the letter on his head and weight it with a stone to keep it in place. The exact similarity of mental processes reveals a similarity of cause, and it is a cause very potent in Chinese affairs. It leads to those multiplied instances of imitativeness with which we are all so familiar, as when the cook breaks an egg and throws it away each time that he makes a pudding, because on the first occasion when he was shown how to make a pudding an egg happened to be bad; or when the tailor puts a patch on a new garment because an old one given him as a measure chanced to be thus decorated. Stories of this sort are doubtless often meant as harmless exaggerations of a Chinese characteristic, but they represent the reality with great fidelity.
Every one acquainted with Chinese habits will be able to adduce instances of a devotion to precedent which seems to us unaccountable, and which really is so until we apprehend the postulate which underlies the act. In a country which
