When a son is born into the family there are great rejoicings amongst every member of it. The one most concerned in the matter, the mother, has had her fears and anxieties for many a day, and her heart has throbbed with doubt and fear as she has asked whether the little one is a boy or a girl, and when she has been told it is a son, the terror has gone out of her heart, and a sense of supreme joy has filled her with immense content. Her position in the home and in the street or village in which she lives is now an established one. Her husband's affections are bound to her, the hectoring, domineering tone of the mother-in-law is softened down, and she has a recognized place in the home that will never be questioned, whilst she can now look into the faces of the wives and mothers of the neighbourhood with a consciousness that no thrill of contempt will ever taint their thought of her. As for the father, he walks about as proud as a turkey-cock, although according to Chinese etiquette he assumes an air of indifference as though nothing special had happened, whilst all the time under those stolid features that are as undemonstrative as a tombstone, a world of passion and joyous feeling and romantic thoughts are playing their sweet music around his heart. And now, congratulations pour in from every quarter upon this most happy event of the arrival of a son. It would indeed for the moment appear as though such a thing had not happened for years, and that the coming of a baby boy was something so rare as to transport the family and all the numerous relatives, and even the nearest neighbours, with such feelings of gladness, that these could only be expressed by the most exaggerated expressions of joy at the wonderful event. The little mite is but a speck in the great ocean of babyhood that fills this land with its swarms of children, and yet, happily for it, it is welcomed as though it were the only one in the Empire, and faces are wreathed in smiles, and the choicest phrases are culled out of the language of poetry, and minds are set to work to invent new phrases by which to express the gladness of soul that men feel at the coming of the little one into the world.