The next professional that I shall try to depict is the public story-teller. This man, as in the case of the strolling doctor, is almost always a man with a certain amount of talent, and with a literary cast of mind that has inclined him to study the ancient writings of China, but more particularly those that deal with fiction and romance. The literature of China is particularly rich in works of this latter description, and those who are fond of exciting adventures and hairbreadth escapes, and dark and mysterious plots, will find a large field in the countless models that have come down from the past for their satisfaction and entertainment. A man sometimes becomes so saturated with the stories he has read that he feels himself competent to entertain a crowd, whilst he describes in a graphic and realistic manner the men and women that are depicted in some famous novel. Few men do this, however, unless they are driven by hard necessity; for a story-teller, though popular with the masses, is not held in high respect, but is looked upon as a man who has failed in the more respectable walks of life, and has taken to this simply because it is the only way left him by which he can lead a lazy, indolent life, and earn just enough to supply him with opium and the small amount of daily food that his opium-drenched system will allow him to take. The story-teller, or, as he is popularly called by the Chinese, "The Narrator of Ancient Things," is really the historian of the common people. Without him, the history of the past, and the story of the great men that lived in ancient times, and the deeds of heroism, and the revolutions of dynasties, would all be lost in oblivion. The great mass of the Chinese are absolutely illiterate, and cannot read the books that contain the stories of the past. The story-teller comes in to supply the lack of learning, and he recounts the tales of great battles that were fought in the dawn of Chinese history, and he tells of the struggles that the Empire has had with the warlike tribes that lay along the northern frontiers of China, and in vivid word-painting he describes the heroes and sages that have played so mighty a part in the building up of the Middle Kingdom. It is entirely due to him that the past lives in the thought and imagination of the men of to-day, and that men's blood is fired and their passions moved at the thought of the great deeds that their fathers in days gone by were able to accomplish.