When a native moves he is supposed to carry fire from his old kitchen to the new one, so as not to rekindle the misfortunes of the last lessee. He desires to burn up his old predecessor’s past, which may have been all bad (or he would not have moved), and to continue his own fortune, which is all good, or ought to be! When moving into a new house, the tenant replaces a threshold, lintel or rafter so that he may not inherit the bad fortune of the former tenant. He starts all things anew, as the new piece of lumber or stone typifies. The old-fashioned Chinese hotel buildings in the northern provinces are not unlike those in Palestine, low buildings with few windows in the walls being built around a court. In the court are troughs for the donkeys, mules, Mongolian ponies and especially camels of the pack trains. The roofs of the buildings, with their up-curling eaves and pagoda pinnacles, are the most beautiful in the world. It seems uncanny to see a crowd passing your house on a holiday without a sound, because the Chinese shoe is all felt. In contrast with this, compare the noisy shuffling of the wooden shoes of Japan, where one man makes more noise than a thousand Chinese, or a dozen Occidentals. The happiness of a Chinese home is measured by the degree in which one’s neighbors leave one alone, not by the degree one is bothered with the repeated visits of neighbors, as is the fashion in the more intrusive Occident. The Chinese illustrate this characteristic by building a high wall around the clustered buildings of the home-compound. As a rule, the Chinese rent not; they move not. They build a time-bronzed, indestructible home, even if it be as simple as one rough rock laid across two age-silvered boulders. Generations, down the ages, flow and follow there, as wave follows wave down the steps of the waterfall. What is the result? A personal fame, heroism of faith, a love, a depth, a beauty, in none of which our Western life can offer an equal joy or strength. The Oriental, never having dropped the extinguished lamp of memory from his hand, is able to follow the path of history with intensity, satisfaction and certainty, while we of the West, having no similar assurance, wander the fields of the earth, unsatisfied still, where our individual name may be carved with permanence. What hate pursues us? What fate awaits us? It is the saddest sign in our psychological organization. If we intend to remain great, we must end this _renting_ of scooped holes in cave apartments, scatter our big cities into smaller ones, spread out on the land and give every man a home of his own, and a strong enough one to leave through the ages to his great-grandson. This is the Chinese way; it is the only true way, as witness their six thousand years of certain history, while they take care to-day of four times our population. The custom of sheltering the families of sons and grandsons within one patriarchal compound is truly Asian. It is described by Homer in the