In the art of dress-making for ladies the Chinese display wonderful skill.  Their taste and inventiveness in this branch are unrivalled even by the best French modistes.  The panier with which it pleases the ladies of the period to protuberate their persons was of Chinese origin.  It was revealed in an opium dream to a celebrated male mantua-maker of Pekin, who sold the idea to a Yankee-Notions man travelling in China for a Paris house.  The inventor was so chagrined at hearing afterwards of the immense fortune realized from it by the man of the West, that he committed suicide by hanging himself on a willow-pattern plate.

Although the Chinaman does not naturally possess an ear for music, according to our standard, yet his imitative power enables him to adapt himself very readily to the production of melody.  One of the Coolies employed in the great HERVEY wash-house at South Belleville, N.J., was observed to watch with great interest an itinerant performer on the accordion.  Shortly afterwards, catching up a sucking-pig by the tail and snout, he manipulated it precisely as the player did the accordion, producing—­accordion to the testimony of several credible witnesses,—­strains quite as good as, if not worse than, those drawn out by that musician.

As soon as the 200,000 Chinamen ordered by Mynheer KOOPMAN-SCHOOP arrive in this country, a good business can be driven by Yankee toothpick makers in supplying them with chopsticks.  This word was originally “stop-chick,” being so called from the use occasionally made of it by Chinamen for knocking down young poultry.  It became corrupted, like everything that is good and pure, by contact with extreme civilization.  Anybody who can make a shoe-peg or wooden toothpick can make a chopstick.  It is to be hoped that the chopstick may ultimately be adopted here instead of the knife and fork.  It would preclude the possibility of people carrying their food into their mouths with the knife—­an outrage so commonly to be remarked at hotel tables.

A very intelligent Chinaman told the writer, not long since, that there is absolutely nothing to be seen or heard of in this country that the Chinese were not familiar with several thousand years ago.  Among them he enumerated target-companies, sewing-machines, patent baby-jumpers, nitro-glycerine, shoo-fly chewing-tobacco, wooden hams, stuffed ballot-boxes, and a hundred other things which we are prone to brag of as being purely Yankee and original.  We are too conceited about ourselves, by a great deal, and it is good for us that even Chinese shoemakers should come here once in a while, to “take us out of our boots.”

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A Midnight Reflection.

The man who commits suicide may be said to show his contempt for the hollowness of the world by putting his foot in it.

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[Illustration:  Gentleman, (reading.) “THE MILITARY AUTHORITIES OF PARIS HAVE CUT DOWN AND UTTERLY DESTROYED THE BOIS DE BOULOGNE.”