promiscuous; the Spirit of the Hearth generally comes in for his share, and Heaven and Earth are seldom left out in the cold.  One very important part of the fun consists in eating largely of a kind of cake prepared especially for the occasion.  Sugar, or some sweet mince-meat, is wrapped up in snow-white rice flour until about the size of a small hen’s egg, only perfectly round, and these are eaten by hundreds in every household.  Their shape is typical of a complete family gathering, for every Chinaman makes an effort to spend the Feast of Lanterns at home.

Under the mournful circumstances of the late Emperor’s death, the 15th of the 1st Chinese moon was this year (1875) hardly distinguishable from any other day since the rod of empire passed from the hands of a boy to those of a baby.  No festivities were possible; it was of course unlawful to hang lamps in any profusion, and all Chinamen have been prohibited by Imperial edict from wearing their best clothes.  The utmost any one could do in the way of enjoyment was to gorge himself with the rice-flour balls above-mentioned, and look forward to gayer times when the days of mourning shall be over.

OPIUM SMOKING

Many writers on Chinese topics delight to dwell upon the slow but sure destruction of morals, manners, and men, which is being gradually effected throughout the Empire by the terrible agency of opium.  Harrowing pictures are drawn of once well-to-do and happy districts which have been reduced to know the miseries of disease and poverty by indulgence in the fatal drug.  The plague itself could not decimate so quickly, or war leave half the desolation in its track, as we are told is the immediate result of forgetting for a few short moments the cares of life in the enjoyment of a pipe of opium.  To such an extent is this language used, that strangers arriving in China expect to see nothing less than the stern reality of all the horrors they have heard described; and they are astonished at the busy, noisy sight of a Chinese town, the contented, peaceful look of China’s villagers, and the rich crops which are so readily yielded to her husbandmen by many an acre of incomparable soil.  Where, then, is this scourge of which men speak?  Evidently not in the highways, the haunts of commerce, or in the quiet repose of far-off agricultural hamlets.  Bent on search, and probably determined to discover something, our seeker after truth is finally conducted to an opium den, one of those miserable hells upon earth common to every large city on the globe.  Here he beholds the vice in all its hideousness; the gambler, the thief, the beggar, and such outcasts from the social circle, meet here to worship the god who grants a short nepenthe from suffering and woe.  This, then, is China, and travellers’ tales are but too true.  A great nation has fallen a prey to the insidious drug, and her utter annihilation is but an affair of time!