On these altars are burnt the paper offerings sent to their departed friends, the manufacture and sale of which occupy a numerous and important class of shops in the great cities. These offerings are generally of gilt and silver paper, in the form of clothes, horses, houses, and other conveniences of which their friends showed their appreciation on earth, and which, by a subtile process of reasoning, they imagine that they can transmit to them in this cheap and ingenious manner--simply by burning these paper effigies at the altars by the tombs! One of the most ingenious and economical of these contrivances, whereby, with a subtlety of argument worthy of the great trafficker in indulgences, Tetzel, who so raised Martin Luther's ire, they manage cheaply to transmit funds to heaven, is the paper dollar, strings of which are sold in the shops, looking exceedingly like goodly bunches of the silvery onion. It is worthy of a people who are so niggardly in all their transactions, who have a copper currency that would sink any man with a fortune invested in it, and who cheat all that come in contact with them, that they should cheat their departed friends with these remittances, a bundle of which are to be obtained for a few cash, and on reaching the other world are understood to pass for a little fortune. In the ordinary affairs of life it is their habit to put three prices on everything they have to sell, and in their dealings with heaven they put their own valuations, amounting to an advance of several thousand per cent., on all their offerings. Could anything be more thoroughly in character? There is, however, a certain degree of respect paid to the memory of departed friends, and an attachment to the soil where lie the bones of their ancestors, that, in as far as it is harmless, is entitled to our respectful consideration. It gives a domestic, settled character to the people, that is worthy of all praise, and should raise them in our estimation, from whatever cause it may spring. It is well known that they show the highest respect to the aged, and that those who emigrate to foreign lands show the greatest anxiety that after death their remains should be sent back to their own country. Ships from San Francisco are often largely freighted with the coffins of deceased Chinamen; and it is worthy of note that few or none of these belong to men born in Shanghai, the Chinese seen in other lands coming almost exclusively from Canton, Ningpo, and Amoy. The northern and middle population of China is not by nature so restless a class as that of the south, and has borne this character since Europeans have been at all acquainted with the Chinese.