It is not without some difficulty that we push our way through the thronging craft, principally little boats termed "sampans," to our moorings abreast of the Dockyard. Curious craft withal, and serving a double purpose; for besides their legitimate one, whole families live and move, are born, and die in them; the necessary accommodation being furnished by an ingenious arrangement of hatches, floors, and partitions, and, as it seems highly fashionable that the Chinese mammas should be making constant additions to the population, the squalling of the young celestials betrays a healthiness of lung, and a knowledge of its capabilities, scarcely to be credited of such small humanity. The earlier fate of these infantile members of the boat population is sad. They are exposed to a "rough-and-tumble" existence as soon as they are ushered into the world, especially should the poor innocent have the misfortune to be born a girl baby, for in that case she has simply to shift for herself, the inhuman parents considering themselves fortunate if they lose a girl or two overboard. The boys, or "bull" children, as they are termed, meet with rather more care relatively speaking. As, from the nature of their occupation, but little time can be devoted to nursing--the mother being compelled to constant labour at the oar--the child is slung on to her back, and, as she moves to and fro with the stroke of the oar, the babe's soft face bobs in unison against its mother's back, a fact which will perhaps explain how it is that the lower class Chinese wear their noses flattened out on their two cheeks rather than in the prominent position usually selected by that organ. It is amazing how wonderfully quick the Chinese pick up a colloquial foreign tongue; the same tailor for instance experiencing no difficulty in making himself understood in English, French, Russian, or Spanish; English, though, is the language par excellence along all the China seaboard. So universal is it that a foreigner must needs know something of our tongue to make himself intelligible to the ordinary Chinaman; and, more remarkable still, there is such a vast difference between the spoken dialects of north and south China--nay, even between any two provinces in the "Flowery Land"--that I have known some of our native domestics from the Canton district, when talking with their countrymen of Chefoo, communicate their ideas and wants in English, because their own medium failed them; the difference between the native dialects being as broad as that between English and Dutch. Though such a diversity exists _orally_, the _written_ character is common, and expresses exactly the same idea all over the empire, and beyond it in Japan, Corea, and the Loo Choo islands. The Chinese are splendid workmen, providing you can furnish them with a model or copy, for there is very little genius, properly so-called, attached to John Chinaman.