often so keen an annoyance to an Occidental, is an equally keen joy to the Chinese. Two kinds of cash, two kinds of weights, two kinds of measures, these seem to him natural and normal, and by no means open to objection. A man who made meat dumplings for sale was asked how many of these dumplings were made in a day; to which he replied that they used about "one hundred [Chinese] pounds of flour," the unknown relation between this amount of flour and the number of resultant dumplings being judiciously left to the inquirer to conjecture for himself. In like manner, a farmer who is asked the weight of one of his oxen gives a figure which seems much too low, until he explains that he has omitted to estimate the bones! A servant who was asked his height mentioned a measure which was ridiculously inadequate to cover his length, and upon being questioned admitted that he had left out of account all above his shoulders! He had once been a soldier, where the height of the men's clavicle is important in assigning the carrying of burdens. And since a Chinese soldier is to all practical purposes complete without his head, this was omitted. Of a different sort was the measurement of a rustic who affirmed that he lived "ninety li from the city," but upon cross-examination he consented to an abatement, as this was reckoning both to the city and back, the real distance being, as he admitted, only "forty-five li one way!"
The most conspicuous instance of this variability in China is seen in the method of reckoning the brass cash, which constitute the only currency of the Empire. The system is everywhere a decimal one, which is the easiest of all systems to be reckoned, but no one is ever sure, until he has made particular enquiries, what number of pieces of brass cash are expected in my particular place to pass for a hundred. He will not need to extend his travels over a very large part of the eighteen provinces to find that this number varies, and varies with a lawlessness that nothing can explain, from the full hundred
