I have already dipped a revealing brush into the subject of names. Were the practice of applying names in a wrong and illogical sequence maintained throughout it might indeed raise a dignified smile, but it would not appear contemptible; but what can be urged when upon an occasion one name appears first, upon another occasion last? A dignity is conferred in old age, and it is placed before the family designation borne by an honoured father and a direct line of seventeen revered ancestors. Another title is bestowed, and eats up the former like a revengeful dragon. New distinctions follow, some at one end, others at another, until a very successful person may be suitably compared to the ringed oleander snake, which has the power of growing equally from either the head or the tail. To express the matter by a definite allusion, how much more graceful and orchideous, even in a condensed fashion, would appear the designation of this selected one, if instead of the usual form of the country it was habitually set forth in the following logical and thoroughly Chinese style:--Chamberlain Joseph, Master, Mr., Thrice Wearer of the Robes and Golden Collar, One of the Just Peacemakers, Esquire, Member of the House of Law-givers, Leader in the Council of Commerce, Presider over the Tables of Provincial Government, Uprightly Honourable Secretary of the Outlying Parts. Among the notes which at various times I have inscribed in a book for future guidance I find it written on an early page, “They do not hesitate to express their fathers’ names openly,” but to this assertion there stands a warning sign which was added after the following incident. “Is it true, Mr. Kong,” asked a lesser one, who is spoken of as vastly rich but discontented with her previous lot, of this person upon an occasion, “is it really true that your countrymen to not consider it right to speak of their fathers’ names, even in this enlightened age?” To this I replied that the matter was as she had eloquently expressed it, and, encouraged by her amiable condescension, I asked after the memory of her paternal grandsire, whose name I had frequently heard whispered in connection with her own. To my inelegant confusion she regarded me for a period as though I had the virtue of having become transparent, and then passed on in a most overwhelming excess of disconcertingly-arranged silence. “You’ve done it now, Kong,” said one who stood by (or, as we would express the same thought, “You have succeeded in accomplishing the undesirable”); “don’t you know that the old man was in the tripe and trotter line?” “To no degree,” I replied truly. “Yet,” I continued, matching his idiom with another equally facile, “wherein was this person’s screw loose? Are they not openly referred to--those of the Line of Tripe and Trotter--by their descendants?”