The earrings are things that every woman wears no matter what her position in life may be. When a girl is five or six years old her ears are bored. This is done if possible on the tenth day of the tenth moon, as that is the one lucky day in the year when it is believed that no inflammation of the ears will follow from the process. In order to fully insure that, however, the needle that has been used for the operation must be thrown down the nearest well. The fashion of the earrings varies in different localities, and if one is very observant, he will be able to tell the district to which a woman belongs by looking at the shape and size of her earrings. In one particular county with which the writer is familiar, the earring assumes enormous dimensions, being several inches in diameter; so large are they indeed that a child that is being nursed can easily pass its arm through one of them without any inconvenience to the mother or danger to itself. Now the peddler has a large field in the countless homes in a considerable district in which to carry on her operations. She is usually a woman with a very fluent and persuasive tongue, who knows the foibles of women and their love for finery. She has a large stock of jewellery which she exhibits with such consummate art that women are inveigled into buying what they do not really need, and which they had no intention of purchasing. The sight, however, of so many attractive works of art proves so irresistible that this clever dealer manages to dispose to those who can afford it many of the articles she has in her basket. The result is that some of these peddlers make in the course of years quite little fortunes, which enable them to spend their declining years in comfort and in comparative affluence. One of these women, with whom I was acquainted, was the wife of a silversmith who had a shop in one of the principal streets of a very populous city. The business was a prosperous one, for the shop had a good reputation and the master of it was a man who knew his trade well and could produce goods that could not be surpassed by any other shop in the town. The true secret of the prosperity, however, lay not with the sales that were made over the counter, but with those that were effected by the wife. She was very plain and far from prepossessing in appearance, and utterly uneducated, for the family had risen from very humble circumstances. She was a woman, however, of great natural abilities, with shrewd common-sense, and she had the power of presenting anything she had to say in a forceful, eloquent manner that was very convincing.