After passing over a desert of brick rubbish—the remains of houses destroyed because they formed ambuscades from which the lurking braves captured or shot at stragglers on the walls, I was fairly inside Canton. Here the streets are all so exactly alike, that in endeavouring to give a notion of one, I may describe all. The majority appeared to vary from seven to ten feet in breadth—the crowded Cranbourn Passage, which runs from St. Martin’s Lane to Castle Street could be soon transformed into one, by a handful of theatrical mechanics. The houses are two or three stories high, and their signboards, in gaudy paint or gilding, either hang in front of them, or are set up in stone sockets, and all at right angles to the houses, so that, as the China character is written perpendicularly, they can be read going up or down the street. The manner in which they intrude on the thoroughfare braves all notices of Commissioners and Boards. The streets are all paved with granite in large flags, and this has acquired a peculiarly polished appearance from the absence of all wheel and quadrupedal traffic, and the constant shuffling along of the soft soles or naked feet of the natives. For the Cantonese do not appear to understand the use of wheels, or beasts of burden; everything is carried on bamboo poles by the intensely hard-working coolie population. Where they can do it, the streets are shaded with matting. And now it was that all my childish associations connected with China were on the point of realization. For in the “pigeon” of Lord Elgin and Sir Michael Seymour—who must shake hands, and understand how much and how honestly both are respected by all of us—in the _China Mail_ information that Patna opium is at 770 dollars, Malwa dull, and for Turkey no demand; and that Bank bills are 4_s._ 9_d._; Sycee silver, 5½ per cent. premium, and Shanghai green-tea quotations are unchanged—in a whirl of treaties, and Peiho forts, and conferences totally misunderstood on either side, from the dismal ignorance of the practical Chinese language amongst our professed Chinese students (who could translate the great metaphysical work of Fo, but would be sadly bothered to decide a simple police “row”);—in all this, there is nothing in common with _our_ old China. But here these associations crowded on us. Men ran along with slung tea-packages, as they did on the gaily-varnished canisters of the “Canton T Company,” in the High Street of my boyhood. Women with their bismuthed faces peered from windows, as they did on the fans and plates from which I formed my earliest notions of what was then called “the Celestial Empire.” And then came another memory, clinging to that delightful time when a belief in the reality of everything was our principal mental characteristic, extending even to “Bogey” in the cellar, and the dustman who threw sand in the eyes of sleepy little boys on the staircase, and the black dog in the passage; nay, even to that celebrated silver spade