Perhaps the most remarkable of the many remarkable things about a Chinaman is his adaptability. Any one seeing him ironing shirts in the States might suppose that he was exercising an inherited talent. But he never saw an iron before coming to America and took to the calling because there was an evident unfilled demand for the work. He is not a laundryman in Cuba, because when he arrived the field was already occupied by the negroes. On the other hand, there was a distinctly felt want of market gardeners, and John jumped into the opening without hesitation. He would have acted with the same prompt decision had the need been for burglars or balloonists. He takes up one line of work as readily as another and whatever he attempts he does well. It matters not whether the hole be round or square, his plastic personality will fit in it snugly. When he went to Calcutta, he found that there was no one to make shoes and paint portraits in manner satisfactory to the Englishman. He calmly and confidently undertook to do both. It is quite unnecessary to state that he succeeded. But when you consider the essential differences between European and Chinese art, both in conception and execution, as well as the fact that the Chinese emigrant is not usually deeply versed in either, the result was simply miraculous. Three favorite occupations of John Chinaman in Cuba are cooking, peddling sweetmeats, and keeping a fruit-stand. In each of these fields he has had to meet native competition, and in his quiet, forceful way he soon overcame it, although in the second he had serious difficulties to master. In short time he had learned to make better _dulces_ than the Cubans had been accustomed to, but when it came to advertising his wares, he found himself hopelessly handicapped by a naturally weak voice when pitted against the Cuban hawker, who has no superior in the world as a street crier. However, with the Chinaman, the next thing to being confronted with an obstacle is to overcome it. John mounted a long red box upon his head and on this drummed continuously with a hardwood stick. In the course of time the Cuban women and children forsook the man who bawled frantically for the silent man who beat a box. The acclimated, it would be altogether incorrect to say the naturalized, Chinaman in Cuba has been shorn of his pigtail, wears the same free shirt, and pantaloons as the native, and is called José, or Miguel, but if you should go into the back room of his store, you would find a vase of joss sticks burning before the shrine of his repulsive looking deity. There are very few Chinese women in the country and John is usually a celibate, but occasionally he marries a negress or mulatto. The children are generally bright, and often good-looking. The Chinaman is an excellent husband and father in such cases.