When it is definitely decided that a pupil is to study for the examinations, he enters a high school, which differs in many respects from the ones which he has hitherto attended. The teacher must be a man of more than average attainments, or he can neither gain nor hold such a place. His salary is much greater than that given by the ordinary school. The pupils are much harder worked, being compelled to spend almost all their waking hours in the study of model examination essays. These are to be committed to memory by the score and even by the hundred, as a result of which process the mind of the student gradually becomes so saturated with the materials of which they are composed, that he will always be able to take advantage of the accumulations of his patient memorizing in weaving his own compositions in the examination hall. During the preceding years of study he has already committed to memory the most important parts of the literature of his native land. He is now intimately familiar with the orthodox explanations of the same. He has been gradually but thoroughly inducted into the mystery of tones and rhymes, the art of constructing poetry, and the weaving of antithetical couplets, beginning with the announcement that the heaven is high, balanced by the proposition that the earth is thick, and proceeding to the intricate and well-nigh inscrutable laws by which relation and correlation, thesis and antithesis are governed. He has now to learn by carefully graded stages the art of employing all his preceding learning in the production of the essay, which will hereafter constitute the warp and the woof of his intellectual fabric. In future he will eat, drink, write, talk, and sleep essays, essays, essays. Measured by Chinese standards, the construction of a perfect essay is one of the noblest achievements of which the human mind is capable. The man who knows all that has been preserved of the wisdom of the ancients, and who can at a moment's notice dash off essays of a symmetrical construction, lofty in sentiment, elevated in style, and displaying a wide acquaintance not only with the theme, but also with cognate subjects, such a man is fit not only to stand before kings, but before the very Son of Heaven himself.