the name of his native district, his own name, his age, the age of his father and mother (if alive), the maiden name of his wife, her age, the number and the ages of his children, and many more questions of similar relevancy and importance, before a single effort is made towards eliciting any one fact bearing upon the subject under investigation.  With a stereotyped people like the Chinese, it does not do to ignore these trifles of form and custom; on the contrary, the witness should rather be allowed to wander at will through such useless details until he has collected his scattered thoughts, and may be safely coaxed on to divulge something which partakes more of the nature of evidence.  Under proper treatment, a Chinese witness is by no means doggedly stubborn or doltishly stupid; he may be either or both if he has previously been tampered with by native officials, but even then it is not absolutely impossible to defeat his dishonesty.  Occasionally a question will be put by a foreigner to an unsophisticated boor, never dreamt of in the philosophy of the latter, and such as would never have fallen from the lips of one of his own officials; the answers given under such circumstances are usually unique of their kind.  We know of an instance where a boatman was asked, in reference to a collision case, at what rate he thought the tide was running.  The witness hesitated, looked up, down, on either side, and behind him; finally he replied:—­“I am a poor boatman; I only earn one hundred and fifty cash a day, and how can you expect me to know at what rate the tide was running?”

BUDDHIST PRIESTS

There are few more loathsome types of character either in the East or West than the Buddhist priest of China.  He is an object of contempt to the educated among his countrymen, not only as one who has shirked the cares and responsibilities to which all flesh is heir, but as a misguided outcast who has voluntarily resigned the glorious title and privileges of that divinely-gifted being represented by the symbol man.  With his own hands he has severed the five sacred ties which distinguish him from the brute creation, in the hope of some day attaining what is to most Chinamen a very doubtful immortality.  Paying no taxes and rendering no assistance in the administration of the Empire, his duty to his sovereign is incomplete.  Marrying no wife, his affinity, the complement of his earthly existence, sinks into a virgin’s grave.  Rearing no children, his troubled spirit meets after death with the same neglect and the same absence of cherished rites which cast a shadow upon his parents’ tomb.  Renouncing all fraternal ties, he deprives himself of the consolation and support of a brother’s love.  Detaching himself from the world and its vanities, friendship spreads its charms for him in vain.  Thus he is in no Chinese sense a man.  He has no name, and is frequently shocked by some western tyro in Chinese who, thinking to pay the everyday compliment bandied between Chinamen, asks to his intense disgust—­“What is your honourable name?” The unfortunate priest has substituted a “religious designation” for the patronymic he discarded when parents, brethren, home, and friends were cast into oblivion at the door of the temple.