Chinatown, with its gay coloring, its tempting shops, its stolid-looking men, its quaint women and cunning babies, was made doubly fascinating to us, entering it officially conducted and riding in state. I do not know to this day to just what facts or virtues or position in life we owe the attentions we received; but it was all recorded upon posters and handbills liberally distributed through Chinatown, announcing our advent. Recorded upon them in those picturesque characters with which the Chinese language puzzles its readers, were the names and eulogies of certain members of our party. The character which stood for the Herr Director looked like a top, a tree and a barrel, while his nativity and manifold virtues were made known in other artistic symbols. I suspect that the man to blame for it all was a certain young American whose mixed ancestry has created a rare and most effective personality. He has inherited all the grace of his French ancestors, the tenacity (a virtue in which he excels) of his Dutch or double Dutch progenitors, and I am sure he can claim kinship with the first man who "kissed the Blarney stone." He could pull the latch-string to any foreign colony in that great conglomerate of peoples, and always be greeted as one of them. The Young Men's Christian Association, in whose name he served, could not have had a more worthy exponent of its social creed, and America could not have projected against these foreigners a better representative than Charles W. Blanpied. The reception was held in the Chinese Presbyterian Church, and upon our arrival we found it crowded by a solemn-looking company of Chinese. We were conducted to the platform and introduced to his Excellency the Consul-General, ministers of various denominations, and dignitaries of Chinatown. This was the first reception we attended where introductions were not followed by vigorous hand-shaking. I am inclined to believe that the softness of the Oriental palm is due to the fact that it is not vigorously pressed every time two men meet each other. The Herr Director was in ecstasy over the beautiful Chinese girls in the choir. Doubtless he would have preferred sitting among them, rather than where he was, between the Consul-General and the chairman of the evening. The reception opened with prayer, as if it were a church service; then the choir sang an anthem, followed by four speeches of welcome. The first by his Excellency the Consul-General lasted an hour and seemed much longer, because it was in Chinese and unintelligible to us. I was asked to respond, and, under the circumstances, my remarks were brief. The clever interpreter made a good deal of them, judging by the length of time it took him, and the tumultuous applause with which every sentence was greeted.