He shaves with an instrument resembling a butcher’s cleaver in miniature.  Nature generally denies him beard, so he shaves what a sailor would term the fore and after part of his head.  He reaps his hirsute crop dry, using no lather.  His cue is pieced out by silken braid, so interwoven as gradually to taper into a slim tassel, something like a Missouri mule-driver’s “black snake” whip-lash.  To lose this cue is to lose caste and standing among his fellows.  No misfortune for him can be greater.

Coarse cowhide boots are the only articles of American wear that he favors.  He inclines to buy the largest sizes, thinking he thereby gets the most for his money, and when his No. 7 feet wobble and chafe in No. 12 boots he complains that they “fit too much.”

He cultivates the vegetables of his native land in California.  They are curiosities like himself.  One resembles our string-bean, but is circular in shape and from two to three feet in length.  It is not in the least stringy, breaks off short and crisp, boils tender very quickly and affords excellent eating.  He is a very careful cultivator, and will spend hours picking off dead leaves and insects from the young plants.  When he finds a dead cat, rat, dog or chicken, he throws it into a small vat of water, allows it to decompose, and sprinkles the liquid fertilizer thus obtained over his plantation.  Watermelon and pumpkin seeds are for him dessert delicacies.  He consumes his garden products about half cooked in an American culinary point of view, merely wilting them by an immersion in boiling water.

There are about fifteen English words to be learned by a Chinaman on arriving in California, and no more.  With these he expresses all his wants, and with this limited stock you must learn to convey all that is needful to him.  The practice thus forced upon one in employing a Chinese servant is useful in preventing a circumlocutory habit of speech.  Many of our letters the Mongolian mouth has no capacity for sounding. R he invariably sounds like l, so that the word “rice” he pronounces “lice”—­a bit of information which may prevent an unpleasant apprehension when you come to employ a Chinese cook.  He rejects the English personal pronoun I, and uses the possessive “my” in its place; thus, “My go home,” in place of “I go home.”

When he buries a countryman he throws from the hearse into the air handfuls of brown tissue-paper slips, punctured with Chinese characters.  Sometimes, at his burial-processions, he gives a small piece of money to every person met on the road.  Over the grave he beats gongs and sets off packs of fire-crackers.  On it he leaves cooked meats, drink, delicacies and lighted wax tapers.  Eventually the bones are disinterred and shipped to his native land.  In the remotest mining-districts of California are found Chinese graves thus opened and emptied of their inmates.  I have in one instance seen him, so far as he was permitted, render some of these funeral honors to an