Nearly all the Chinese in America have passed some of their early years at school, where they learned to write a few of the many characters of their language, and to read it with more or less facility. This is the case even among the Sinning people, few of whom go up at home to the district examinations, and among whom, even in China, there are few literary graduates or persons of distinction--a condition due not so much to their lack of natural ability, as to the extreme and grinding poverty to which they are subjected. Among those from Hohshan and the country adjacent to the city of Canton are found many of considerable attainments; not men who would be considered scholars at home, or who have even obtained the degree of _siu-tsai_ that constitutes the first step to advancement, but clerks who are able to read and understand much of the abstruse classical literature of their country, and whose sympathies and traditions are allied with those of the great literary aristocracy by which their nation is dominated. Many of their country people have attained eminence in the past, and the lists of the successful graduates at the Triennial Examinations at Canton, which are received and posted in the shops here, frequently contain names not only of students from their native villages, but of their own cousins and kindred. This class forms a small part, however, of the great mass of the immigrants, and their literary ambitions are soon lost here in the struggle for existence, for which they seem less fitted than many of their ruder neighbors. The latter appear to be little influenced by the classical instruction of the schools. While the books of the sages and philosophers constitute the literature, _par excellence_, of China, there exists a vast popular literature, quasi-historical, imaginative, and romantic, which is read by the mass of the people and more directly controls their minds than the teachings of Confucius and his disciples. Within it are enshrined the popular traditions and folk-tales, in many other countries as yet handed down orally, here amplified and embellished, and although written in the vulgar tongue, receiving many charms from their beauties of style and literary execution. Stories of the magician _Chau Kung_, of the heroic _Kwán Kung_, long since deified as the God of War; of _Muk Kwai Ying_, that martial heroine of Chinese historical romance, with tales of the _Pát Sín_ (the Eight Genii), and Buddhist legends without number, all go to make up this intermingled mass of romance and tradition.