Intemperance, on the other hand, is extremely rare; but those who would be drunkards in Europe, Mgr. Favier assured me when I was in Peking, are opium-smokers in China, where he estimates that about one-fifth of the population of the towns give themselves over to this horrible practice. In the country districts the number is very much less, and another missionary, who lives at Fo-kien in Southern China, estimates it at not more than five per cent. The habit of opium-smoking is very widely spread among the upper classes and the literati; but its effects are not so pronounced among the rich as among the poor, who, by reason of bad diet, are less prepared to resist its effects, especially as they generally indulge in this vice in their leisure hours in the most dreadful dens, and, moreover, smoke a very inferior quality of opium. A young man who begins to indulge in this pernicious habit in his twentieth year usually shuffles off this mortal coil before he is twenty-two. The vices of the Chinese do not particularly shock foreigners who live among them, for they are not obliged to see them; but it is otherwise with their universal and repellently filthy habits and intense love of all kinds of horrible noises, which they indulge in on every possible occasion, be it a sad or merry one, a marriage or a funeral, at festivals as well as at fires. What exasperates a European, however, more than anything else are the vulgar superstitions which replace among the Celestials the spirit of religion, which is quite absent, and which constitute another hindrance to progress. Their strange ideas with respect to _feng-shui_, or geomancy, often upset the least attempt at introducing any improvement even in European concessions or in such cities as Hong-Kong and Singapore. Then, again, the disposition of the Chinese mind does not admit of general or abstract ideas, and repudiates all sense of the ideal, and, in a word, is sterilized by such absolute materialism as to shock even the most cynical of Europeans. Take them for all in all, therefore, the Celestials may be described as a not particularly seductive or sympathetic people, all the less so as their ugly appearance is not compensated for by the charm of manner which renders the Japanese so agreeable and which enables them to gild even their vices.