Thieves are required by the Government to be organized into companies or guilds with elected heads, with whom the Government and public may treat. If a man is busy at his store, a traveling restaurant will wait upon him. A charcoal furnace, culinary vessels, and food, are slung upon a pole carried by the proprietor, who stops before the customer's door, and cooks a meal to order. The first paddle-wheel boats built in China were anchored in the stream where the current turned the paddle-wheels, and ground grain for food. The Chinese paint the edges of their shoe-soles white. An expensive coffin is always an acceptable present from an affectionate son and heir to his living father. Military officers in the Chinese army formerly wore embroidered silk petticoats, and strings of beads around their necks; they carried fans, and mounted their horses on the right hand side. Chinese Cashiers are said to be uniformly honest. CHAPTER XI. American Tea Culture. During a period of at least 40 years, tea plants have been cultivated by a few experimenters in the southern United states, and American tea, grown South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, has satisfactorily supplied the family needs of a hundred or more persons, at a cost not exceeding the retail price of good foreign tea. When Mr. Wm. G. Le Duc, Commissioner of the Department of Agriculture at Washington, seriously recommended systematic tea culture in the southern States, press writers and press readers found a new subject of mirth and standing jokes which lasted for several years. To be sure, those who laughed so long and loudly did not know the difference between a Chinese tea plant and a China Aster, and few of them had ever heard that in certain tea growing districts of China, ice and snow were familiar associates of the hardy Chinese tea plant. Enquiry would have taught them that here in the United States individual tea plants had for many years withstood a freezing temperature in winter. Better informed persons fell back upon the objection that Americans could never learn the secrets of curing tea, and finally that the very low cost of Chinese labor would be fatal to American competition. But the mills of the Gods grind right along, regardless of individual opinions or precedents. Foreign tea plants have been so acclimatised in South Carolina that a plantation of tea has withstood a winter temperature of zero, the lowest recorded degree for 150 years; the secrets of curing the leaf have been disclosed and successfully practiced by Americans, and a cheap form of child labor for picking the tea leaves has resulted in commercial success for American grown tea.