This is the thirteenth day of the fifth moon of the thirty-third year of Kwang-su, very early in the morning--that is, "very early" for me, because I ordered my "boy" last evening to call me at eight o'clock this morning and not a minute before. Here, in the rambling old temple where we live, we have learned to go to bed with the sun on the fourteenth and on the last day of each Chinese moon, because we know that the wailing pipes of the early morning celebrations before the gods on the first and fifteenth of the moon will be certain to wake us at a truly heathenish hour. But when an extra, unannounced, unexpected festival day is ushered in with cymbals, pipes, and firecrackers, then we just have to lose our morning sleep and try not to lose our tempers. This morning is one of those dawns of misery. Even as I write the temple bells, the drums, and those peculiar jig-time horns are setting up a discordant hubbub in the courtyards, while at intervals a big cracker sends me springing into the air with a start that fearfully tries my nerves. At first this morning I endeavored to sleep, but I soon gave that up to don my kimono and sally forth to find out the cause of this gratuitous Fourth of July. Out on the terrace in front of the inner gates of the temple, to which the rays of the rising sun had not yet bent down, there was gathered a small group of men and boys watching such a display of firecrackers as would have attracted a whole City Hall Park full of people at home. Yet their interest was apparently much like their numbers--very small. They just gazed at the exploding end of the red string of noise without any comments and without any more evident interest than they took in seeing that the small boys picked up all of the unexploded crackers that were blown out of the danger circle by their more powerful brothers. My appearance in a kimono and straw sandals seemed to furnish them with more excitement than the rope of crackers which hung from the firecrackers pole hard by. Such a din! Can you imagine a string of firecrackers, large and small woven together, of over one hundred thousand? But I am getting ahead of my story. By way of introduction I meant only to tell you that I have for some time been planning to write a letter to your good editor in the hope that he might be willing to pass on to you of the fast-disappearing American "firecracker age" my story of how this country, the native land of the "whip-guns," manufactures and uses these crackers which we think of as belonging only to our Fourth of July.