will be accorded to you.  Your present lustrum is not a fortunate one; but it has nearly expired, and better days are at hand.  Fruit cannot thrive in the winter. (We had placed our birthday in the 12th moon.) Conflicting elements oppose:  towards life’s close prepare for trials.  Wealth is beyond your grasp; but nature has marked you out to fill a lofty place.”  How the above was extracted from the eight characters which represented the year, month, day, and hour of our birth, is made perfectly clear by a sum showing every step in the working of the problem, though we must confess it appeared to us a humbugging jumble, the most prominent part of which was the answer.  We found among other things that earth predominated in the combination:  hence our inability to grasp wealth. Water was happily deficient, and on this datum we were blessed in anticipation with three sons, to say nothing of daughters.

And this is the sort of trash that is crammed down the throats of China’s too credulous children—­the “babies,” as the Mandarins are so fond of calling them.  For this rubbish they freely spend their hard-earned wages, consulting some favourite prophet on most of their domestic and other affairs with the utmost gravity and confidence.  Few Chinamen make a money venture without first applying to the oracle, and certainly never marry without arranging a lucky day for the event.  Ignorance and credulity combine to support a numerous class of the most consummate adepts in the art of swindling; the supply, however, is not more than adequate to the demand, albeit they swarm in every street and thoroughfare of a Chinese city.

GAMES AND GAMBLING

Chinamen suffer horribly from ennui—­especially the first of the four classes into which the non-official world has been subdivided.[*] They have no rational amusements wherewith to fill up the intervals of work.  They hate physical exercise; more than that, they despise it as fit only for the ignorant and low.  Yet they have not supplied its place with anything intellectual, and the most casual observer cannot fail to notice that China has no national game.  Fencing, rowing, and cricket, are alike unknown; and archery, such as it is, claims the attention chiefly of candidates for official honours.  Within doors they have chess, but it is not the game Europeans recognise by that name, nor is it even worthy of being mentioned in the same breath.  There is also another game played with three hundred and sixty black and white pips on a board containing three hundred and sixty-one squares, but this is very difficult and known only to the few.  It is said to have been invented by His Majesty the Emperor Yao who lived about two thousand three hundred and fifty years before Christ, so that granting an error of a couple of thousand years or so, it is still a very ancient pastime.  Dominoes are known, but not much patronised; cards,