Our servants having, after much haggling, procured the wherewithal for breakfast, let us return to our kitchen and see the meal prepared. Your first exclamation is sure to be, “How smoky it is! Oh, stifling! Let us come away!” Well, this kitchen certainly is not so cosey and neat as American kitchens usually are. The smoke does not go out by chimney, but through the skylight and wherever it finds an outlet. The walls are black with the accumulation of years of soot. That large stove in the corner is built of brick. The smoke issues through an aperture in the back and curls upward through the opening into the clear sky. On the top of this stove is a large round iron spider about three feet in diameter. In this rice is cooking. Straw being cheaper, is burnt in this stove instead of wood, and some one is required to feed the fire constantly. Turning to the left, we see little clay stoves, on which food is frying in spiders, or boiling in earthen pots, over a wood fire. Grandmother and her daughters are superintending the various preparations. Vegetables are cut into bits and boiled with pork or mutton, making a soup. Greens are boiling. Fish is steaming, frying, or stewing with or without vegetable. Meat is cut fine; when the spider becomes heated lard is put in it, then pieces of onion, then the shred meat, and all is stirred till well embrowned; then turnips, potatoes, and sometimes other vegetables are added and, after boiling water is poured in, the whole is left to simmer and stew. All food, we observe, is cut in pieces before being cooked, or else before serving. For no knives, no forks, are used. At ten A. M. the tables are set; those for men either in the wings, or in their rooms; those for the women in their common sitting-room or parlor. Each table will seat eight persons. No table linen is used. Chop-sticks and spoons are placed before each place. The food is brought in large bowls or plates. Rice is carried to the table in a wooden pail or wicker basket, from which it is served in small bowls. The servants summon the inmates to breakfast. The younger ones do not presume to sit till their elders are seated; then after making a show of asking permission to eat, when the elders gravely nod assent, the breakfast begins. Soup is taken first; then each person, holding the chop-sticks in the right hand and the bowl of rice in the left, lifts his food to his mouth, pushes the lumps in with the sticks, alternating this motion with picking meat, fish or vegetables from the dishes which are common to all. One must take only from that side of the plate which is nearest to him, however. It is a breach of etiquette to reach over to the opposite side. When one finishes, he bids the rest to “eat leisurely,” which is our mode of saying, “Excuse me!” The Chinese invariably wash their hands and faces after every meal.