The method in which the studies are carried on is the very reverse of what is demanded and insisted upon in the home schools. There the great aim is to secure not only perfect order but as complete silence as possible. When there is anything like noise in the school-room it means that the lads are talking with each other and not studying their lessons. An English lad can best master these by thinking over them, and in silence committing to memory the various thoughts or problems that may be contained in the book he is called upon to study. Now it seems impossible for any Chinese boy to impress upon his mind's eye the intricate and apparently meaningless strokes that make up the ordinary Chinese word. He seems to be able to do this only by bawling them at the very top of his voice. Efforts have been made to get the scholars in a school to learn them without raising their voices, but failure has always been the result. The consequence is, that silence amongst the lads is most displeasing to a Chinese school-master, and a stern, severe look from him will set them all off into shouts so deafening that only one great uproar can be heard resounding through the building, each lad seeming only to be contending with all the rest to see if he cannot outshout them all. The drudgery of learning to recognize the Chinese words is something that cannot be appreciated by a Western student. With English words, for example, each one is composed of so many letters, has a definite sound and definite meanings, and after a time, if a boy fails to remember any particular one, he simply spells it, and at once sound comes tripping back to his recollection. There is no such easy process to the grasping of the Chinese characters. Each one is a solemn, hard-featured picture that stands apart by itself and has no connecting link with any other one in the language. You cannot reason out what shall be the sound or meaning of any one word by analogy, for each one is complete in itself and has a solitary entity of its own. A page of Chinese print gives one the impression that one has lighted upon a series of cryptic puzzles that the inventor has made as intricate and involved as the complex and oblique mind of the Chinese could make them. The Chinese school-masters throughout the country having realized that to grasp the sounds of these weird and unromantic figures and the meaning that lies concealed behind them would be an absolute impossibility for the youth of the country, have divided up the great attempt into two distinct efforts. The first thing, therefore, that a lad has to do when he goes to school is to shout out in all the various tones of the gamut the names of these ancient, hoary-headed symbols, and at the same time to impress upon his memory the picture of each one, with its dots and curves and minute up and down strokes, that it shall be a living picture that his mind can call up at any moment that he hears its name pronounced.