He has absolutely nothing excepting what he stands in, and so few cash that no sooner have you agreed to employ him than he at once asks for an advance to buy his next meal. The sum you promised him is princely when compared with what he could earn in his own country, and his mode of living is on a most luxurious scale, when contrasted with the meagre food he had in his native village. Now he has rice every day and fish, and luxuries brought from northern seas, no longer a vision of dreams, but realities that he indulges in every day. Now, judging from an English standpoint, one would imagine that this poverty-stricken Chinaman, whose experience of want has been so real, would hold on like grim death upon a situation where life has been made so easy for him. But here comes in one of the surprises that often makes the Chinese character so inexplicable. A month goes by, and one day with the silent tread of his shoeless feet he sidles up to you, and he says he wants to tell you that he is going to leave you. You are astonished, and you ask him, with a look of wonder on your face, what he means and what he intends doing? He is not going to do anything, he declares, and he gives you nine reasons for his conduct, not one of which is the true one, the tenth and real one being hidden away in that mysterious brain of his, and he leaves you. A few days hence you see him loafing about with no apparent means of livelihood, and he is fast reverting to the original potatoes-fed type that he was when he left his country home. Another point that is inexplicable in the Chinese is his amazing credulity. His character is naturally a strong one, his common-sense of the broad and robust kind. There is hardly any subject in common life where his opinion is not of a healthy, breezy description. It is one of the mysteries of the inscrutable Chinaman that at times he seems to be as credulous as the most unenlightened African that trembles before the decision of the Obi doctor. In the early years, when the foreigner was an unknown and dreaded character, the wildest and most improbable stories were circulated amongst the common people, and more believed in. A mandarin in a large city in the northern part of the Empire, where the people were inspired with a dread lest they were going to be attacked by the English, took advantage of their credulity by putting out proclamations all over his district, which informed them that they had no reason whatever to fear the foreigners, because, as they had no knee-joints, when they fell down they could not rise up again. This was at once accepted as a truth, and the agitation and alarm from that time passed entirely away.