The Chinese employer finds it more economical to pay his men $20 a month and to feed them well himself, rather than pay him a somewhat more advanced wage and take the risk of his being sufficiently well fed at home to maintain his working efficiency. Clerks in the smaller Chinese shops, carpenters employed by Chinese builders, painters, etc., are therefore paid in this manner, and their families must bear the resulting hardships. Four or five children mean that the wife must also be a wage-earner, and the children too as soon as they are old enough—often before. But although a rice and tea diet is popularly supposed to prevail among the Chinese of this class, the only family I found subsisting on such a diet was doing so because the father had had a long illness and was paying off a debt he had contracted. A trip through the tenements at dinner time revealed nothing more simple than a bowl of rice crowned by a plump portion of fish, which was being absorbed by a group of children in one of the alleys. Other kitchens showed pots of stewed mushrooms, soy, green salad, or fish; but always accompanied by a bowl of rice, and of course, a pot of tea. The tenement rooms of the Chinese families are the most attractive of any seen. The furnishings are simple, and there are always pots of flowers and ferns at the door. The women are friendly, and chat freely of their affairs so far as vocabulary will permit. Next door, however, one may find a bare room occupied by two or three men who have no families; and two or three hours later they will be there gambling and opium-smoking, breaking up the cheerful homelike aspect of the place. In the cottages, which were often occupied by two families, the women were watering their garden patches, complaining the while that their “men too much long work, no home.” These are the wives of the clerks in the larger shops, or of merchants. Women from the adjoining cottages came to their doors and nodded a smiling greeting. All of them are much interested in the suffrage movement which under the leadership of prominent Hawaiian women is agitating Honolulu, and all vehemently say that they “laik work.” The girls and women for the most part still wear their comfortable, becoming native costume of blue or lavender cotton; and the former especially are exceedingly attractive, with their bright faces, slender bodies and long thick braids of black hair. Prostitution and sex immorality is almost unknown and even the polygamous household is falling into disfavor, especially with the second wives. It will be interesting to note what their emancipation will bring to the coming generation. _PORTUGUESE._