The mandarin at Gen San came on board, attended with great ceremony--flags, banners, pennons, soldiers, and trumpeters, in boat loads; the latter gentlemen being furnished with brass instruments, such as angels are usually depicted with, but which can be made to shut up like a telescope to vary the music. The men are certainly a fine race--tall and upright as an arrow, and rather intelligent looking than otherwise. They wear long coarsely-fabricated, white cotton garments, split up behind, in front and on the hips--all tails in fact; but the great national peculiarity seems to be the hats, some made of bamboo, others of horse hair, of very delicate net or gauze work, and shaped like a reversed flower pot with a rim attached. Its purpose cannot be to keep the head warm, to protect it from the rain, or to answer any other purpose to which a hat may be applied: for instance you could not get a drink of water by means of it, nor would it serve as a pillow. The ordinary color of these hats is black, but in consequence of the queen's demise they now don a white one--white being, as in China, the symbol of mourning. Some who cannot afford, or have not the inclination, to purchase a white one, paste a patch of white paper over the crown of the black one which answers the purpose just as well. They betray a weakness for rum, and a knowledge of the vessels in which it is usually issued on board a man-of-war, scarcely credited of a people who have so few means of acquiring such familiarity. But so it is, and if noses can be accepted as indices of truth in such matters, something stronger than water has been used in tinting them. The soldiers of the party presented the appearance of guys, rather than men of "fight." What do you say to a mixed uniform of pink and light blue glazed calico, over dingy under-garments of impossible analysis, and a mushroom hat of the coarsest felt, with the distinguishing red horse hair attached to the crown; wooden shot and powder pouches of the roughest and rudest make slung across the shoulders by a piece of thin cord? And such shot! irregular pellets of raw iron and lead, of which all I can say is that dying by such help would be far from an aesthetic operation. And yet these same soldiers, as a mere pastime, are employed in a service which requires no mean bravery. When not fighting the two-legged enemies of their country, they are engaged waging war against the four-legged ones, their land being infested with tigers of great size and strength. In the evening the local mandarin sent a present of fruits, fowls, eggs, vegetables, and a pig, to the admiral. "Dennis," however, made a terrible fuss at the prospect of being converted into a toothsome dish for the sailors, and sent up such a squeal, in choicest pig-Corean--piercing, prolonged, torturing--that the band was compelled to cease, in the midst of the most pathetic part of "_La Traviata_," out of respect of his superior music.