Guided by the hint in this quotation, we are able to trace the book still farther back to its very beginning. June 20, 1867, he said in his Journal: “Maggie Brown [Julia’s sister] has been pushing on pretty lively with the Chinese. I made her lessons for a good while, which she studies, and now she is reading ‘The Peep of Day.’ I tried to make her lessons with a view to bringing out the peculiarities of Chinese idiom. It led me to a good deal of thinking and investigating. I have a mind to review and complete the work, and may some day give it to the world. My great difficulty is in classifying the results attained.” As the years went by his ideas of the plan for the work took definite shape. In one of his letters concerning it he wrote: Each lesson illustrates an idiom, the word idiom being taken with some latitude. The sentences, as you will see, are gathered from all quarters, and introduce every variety of subjects. I have also introduced every variety of style that can be called Mandarin, the higher style being found chiefly in the second hundred lessons. The prevailing object, however, is to help people to learn Mandarin as it is spoken. I have tried to avoid distinct localisms, but not colloquialisms. A large acquaintance with these is important, not to say essential, to every really good speaker of Mandarin. It is, of course, possible to avoid the most of them, and to learn to use a narrow range of general Mandarin which never leaves the dead level of commonplace expressions, except to introduce some stilted book phrase. This, however, is not what the Chinese themselves do, nor is it what foreigners should seek to acquire. Many colloquialisms are very widely used, and they serve to give force and variety to the language, expressing in many instances what cannot be expressed in any other way. I have tried to represent all quarters, and in order to do so I have in many cases given two or more forms.