As for their character, it is that of a people whom slavery, ignorance, and sloth have rendered poor, timid, and apathetic. Yet they are capable of being raised to a higher moral and intellectual standard. They have many serious defects, it is true; they are deficient, for example, in the artistic sentiment. Even of the latter evidence is found in some surprising mural paintings, which reproduce, with loving fidelity, all that is bright and living in nature,--birds, insects, flowers. But, as a rule, the Annamites are insensible to the arts. Their shrill monotonous music is terrible to a cultured ear; and it may be doubted whether ours is agreeable to them. Of sculpture they know only the rudiments; their poetry is indifferent; they cannot dance. Their literary research is confined to an acquaintance with a few Chinese characters; and their scientific acquirements are a blank. ~THEIR DRESS AND HABITATIONS.~ Then as to their attire. They never abandon their clothes until they fall into rags and tatters, though they are insufficient to protect them against the variations of their climate, and more particularly against the keen frosty mornings of December and January. Their huts or hovels, nearly all built upon piles, half in the water and half in the earth or mud, are singularly unhealthy. The cultivation of rice, and their occupation as fishermen, have rendered them almost amphibious. Water rises frequently to the floor of an Annamite house, particularly in high tides, but it does not discompose the owner; who, in such an event, crouches contentedly on the domestic hearth, or rocks to and fro in his rude hammock, murmuring some monotonous air, or smoking a cigarette shaped like a blunderbuss. ~THE PLAIN OF THE TOMBS.~ At Saigon (or Sai-gun), the French settlement and seaport, situated at the mouth of a river of the same name, the traveller finds much to interest him. The Botanic Garden, for instance, will well repay inspection, stocked as it is with rare, beautiful, and curious specimens of tropical vegetation. Close at hand lies the so-called Plain of the Tombs; the scene, a century agone, of numerous battles between the inhabitants of Lower Cochin-China and the Annamites; and, between 1860 and 1864, of several engagements between the Annamites and the French. The uniformity of its vast expanse is broken by a number of mounds or tumuli; some on a modest, others on a splendid scale. Constructed of earth or brick, they are covered with a kind of cement, on which are depicted in vivid colours the figures of fantastic animals and impossible plants, while the name and titles of the deceased are inscribed in conspicuous characters. * * * * *