hopeless oral lessons in English, and certain sentences to be copied, which he did with marvelous precision.  I remember one instance when this peculiar faculty of imitation was disastrous in result.  In setting him a copy, I had blurred a word which I promptly erased, and then traced the letters more distinctly over the scratched surface.  To my surprise, See Yup triumphantly produced his copy with the erasion itself carefully imitated, and, in fact, much more neatly done than mine.

In our confidential intercourse, I never seemed to really get nearer to him.  His sympathy and simplicity appeared like his flowers—­to be a good-humored imitation of my own.  I am satisfied that his particularly soulless laugh was not derived from any amusement he actually felt, yet I could not say it was forced.  In his accurate imitations, I fancied he was only trying to evade any responsibility of his own.  That devolved upon his taskmaster!  In the attention he displayed when new ideas were presented to him, there was a slight condescension, as if he were looking down upon them from his three thousand years of history.

“Don’t you think the electric telegraph wonderful?” I asked one day.

“Very good for Mellican man,” he said, with his aimless laugh; “plenty makee him jump!”

I never could tell whether he had confounded it with electro-galvanism, or was only satirizing our American haste and feverishness.  He was capable of either.  For that matter, we knew that the Chinese themselves possessed some means of secretly and quickly communicating with one another.  Any news of good or ill import to their race was quickly disseminated through the settlement before we knew anything about it.  An innocent basket of clothes from the wash, sent up from the river-bank, became in some way a library of information; a single slip of rice-paper, aimlessly fluttering in the dust of the road, had the mysterious effect of diverging a whole gang of coolie tramps away from our settlement.

When See Yup was not subject to the persecutions of the more ignorant and brutal he was always a source of amusement to all, and I cannot recall an instance when he was ever taken seriously.  The miners found diversions even in his alleged frauds and trickeries, whether innocent or retaliatory, and were fond of relating with great gusto his evasion of the Foreign Miners’ Tax.  This was an oppressive measure aimed principally at the Chinese, who humbly worked the worn-out “tailings” of their Christian fellow miners.  It was stated that See Yup, knowing the difficulty—­already alluded to—­of identifying any particular Chinaman by name, conceived the additional idea of confusing recognition by intensifying the monotonous facial expression.  Having paid his tax himself to the collector, he at once passed the receipt to his fellows, so that the collector found himself confronted in different parts of the settlement with the receipt and the aimless