In our initial visit to Shanghai we saw a countryman staring at foreign sights and inventions, and a Chinese urchin smoking a foreign cigarette, and may now proceed to study them as types of two classes, the one somewhat mystified by foreign ways, and the other manifestly “emancipated” and imitative.

If we follow the advice of the Leviathan of Letters, and

we shall probably be struck with the fact that humanity is readily divisible into two classes: first, those in a rut, and, second, those not in a rut; and feel also that the first class is further divisible into two subclasses: those who wish to be pulled out of the rut, and those who desire no such thing.

The countryman gazing at yon liberal allowance of telegraph and telephone wires is awaking to the fact that he has lived his life stuck in a rut—a respectable rut doubtless, by reason of the multitudes stuck therein, but a rut nevertheless.

Now he is a simple countryman, and ready to acknowledge with his lips what is passing in his mind. And having wondered awhile whether it is orthodox in a foreign street to cry “Excellent!” or safe, with that Sikh policeman so near, to cry “Ocean fiend!” he splits the difference by uttering the monosyllable “Ch'iao!” which translates into our trisyllable “Marvellous!” And thus saying, he confesses that he and his have been in a rut for ages.