I myself should like to know, apart from what the learned historians have to say, and apart from the views of passing travellers who have lived a few years in the country, and who therefore have never seen its life below the surface--I should like to know just what one ordinary Chinaman feels and thinks, or does not feel and think, with regard to his native land at the end of the nineteenth century. I should like to know just what he sincerely thinks of its pig-tails and its tea plantations, what he feels to its scenery on the banks of the Yangtsekiang, and in its northern mountain regions, and exactly how its pagodas, and its Mongolian dynasty, and the position of its women, and its flowers, and even its stiff gardens, strike him. I should be interested to know just what he feels towards its complex peoples, and the foreigners; what he hopes for its future, and how he regards its past. His views might not always be correct, perhaps not often, but as long as they were sincerely his, set down to please no one and to grieve no one, but because they were his, they would have a certain interest for me. It would be the picture of only one John Chinaman--what he thought and felt towards his land, a purely personal document, but it might have a certain value! Whatever value attaches to this little book is of this kind only. It is a personal document. Had I the health to carry out my plans and to write somewhat in detail of what I think and feel with regard to our English folk in Africa, and above all of our Natives and their problems and difficulties, the little book might have had a certain rotundity; now it is a broken segment only. Nor should I publish it now were it not at the request of many friends; for I am unable adequately to revise even this segment. There is also one insignificant matter I should like to notice. It has been said I love the African Boer. That is true. But it has been given as a reason for my doing so that I share his blood, and that is not true. One could not belong to a more virile folk, but I have no drop of Dutch blood. My father was a South German, born in Würtemberg, who studied at Basel, and when only twenty-one years old came to London, where he married my mother, of purely English blood; and together with her came to Africa as a missionary about the year 1836.[1] My training was exclusively and strongly English. I did not begin learning any other language till I was eight and have never gained the complete mastery of any other. It is my mother speech and England is my mother land. [1] It was at the end of 1838.--S.C.C.S.