Engaging the services of a guide and interpreter, a party of us set out one afternoon to view the shops, with the ulterior purpose of purchasing some of the famous pottery and silks. We went in rickshas to Ha‐ta‐man Street, which is a good commercial thoroughfare. Arrived there, we discarded our man‐drawn vehicles and strolled along the high side‐walks, pausing now and then to gaze at the curious pictures of Chinese street life. Here peddlers sat surrounded by their wares. An old‐clothes merchant, selecting a convenient space of blank wall, had driven nails into it, and hung on them garments of all kinds, from the cylindrical trousers of the Chinese woman to the tarnished, gold‐embroidered coat of a mandarin, with perhaps a suggestive rent and stain that spoke all too plainly of the fate of the last owner. Another man sat amid piles of footgear—the quaint tiny shoes of women that would not fit a European baby, the slippers of the superior sex, with their thick felt soles, the long knee boots for winter wear. Here a venerable, white‐haired Chinaman, with the beard that bespoke him a grandfather, dozed among a heterogeneous collection of rusty knives, empty bottles and jampots, scraps of old iron, and broken locks of native or European manufacture. Another displayed cheap pottery of quaint shape and hideous colouring, or the curious, pretty little snuff‐bottles, with tiny spoons fitted into the stopper, that I have never seen anywhere but in China. Another offered tawdry embroidery or tinselled fan‐cases. Piles of Chinese books and writing‐desks, with their brushes and solid blocks of ink, were the stock‐in‐trade of another. And true Oriental haughty indifference marked the demeanour of these cheapjacks when we searched among their curious wares for souvenirs of Pekin. They evinced not the least anxiety for us to buy, although they knew that the lowest price that they would extract from us was sure to be much more than they could obtain from a Chinese purchaser. Their demands were exorbitant for the commonest, most worthless article; and they showed no regret if we turned away exasperated at their rapacity. One asked me fifteen dollars for a thing which he gave eventually, after hard bargaining, for one, and then probably made a profit of fifty cents over it. Farther on we stopped to gaze at a small crowd assembled round a fortune‐teller. A stout country‐woman was having her future foretold. The prophet, looking alternately at her hand and at a chart covered with hieroglyphics, was evidently promising her a career full of good fortune and happiness, to judge from the rapt and delighted expression on her face.