The Chinaman has a wonderful facility for putting the best face upon a bad argument. He has the most ingenious ways of presenting his view of the matter, so that by and by he will have turned the tables, and he will make it appear that he has been altogether right whilst you have been absolutely in the wrong. His favourite method is to confuse the issues, and the Chinese, with their turbid way of looking at things, continually fall into the snare, and having accepted his premises they must perforce accept also his conclusions. Here were these rough, noisy chair-bearers insisting that they had acted upon our agreement to come at daylight, though the sun was high in the heavens and it was getting close upon nine o'clock. They ignored all our attempts to prove that the hour of daylight had passed some hours ago by simply insisting that we were wrong. The hypnotic influence of assertions made confidently and persistently began to have its effect on our mind. Were we really labouring under a mistake, and were the broad daylight and the great sun that glared down upon us simply visions of the imagination? We felt that if we did not stop the discussion we should soon be consenting to all they said, so we got into our chairs and with a peremptory wave of the hand ordered them to go on. With smiling faces and with an air of victory in their voices, they lifted the poles on to their shoulders and commenced the long journey of twenty miles that lay before us. When the bearers are strong and know their work, and when they have got into step with each other, the motion of the chair is a very pleasant one and the time passes by very quickly. This latter is in a great measure due to the constantly changing scenes that meet one by the way. After leaving the city we emerged into the open country, where we had ample evidence of the skill with which the farmer cultivates his fields. He seems, indeed, to have penetrated into the secrets of nature and to have learned how to manipulate his fields, and how to coax and win the various kinds of seeds that he plants that they shall all respond to the efforts he puts forth and gladden his heart with their fruitful harvests. The Chinese farmer is a most unaesthetic, most uninteresting looking character, and strikes one as far inferior to the rosy-cheeked, jolly-looking specimens that till our lands in England. He has altogether a mean appearance and does not at first sight induce us to have any high respect for him. His dress is against him. It is made of sombre-looking blue cotton cloth, slouchily made, and usually anything but clean. He absolutely neglects his toilette, and his face and hands show an ingrained dislike to water. Whether as the result of hard work or of exposure to the sun, which burns like X Rays into his skin, his countenance in a comparatively early stage becomes furrowed with wrinkles, and in time he gets prematurely old looking.