but only to insist that such a language, so constructed, invites to "intellectual turbidity" as the incandescent heats of summer gently woo to afternoon repose.
Nothing is more common in conversation with an unedu- cated Chinese than to experience extreme difficulty in ascer- taining what he is talking about. At times his remarks appear to consist exclusively of predicates, which are woven together in an intricate manner, the whole mass seeming, like Moham- med's coffin, to hang in the air, attached to nothing whatever. To the mind of the speaker, the omission of a nominative is a point of no consequence. He knows what he is talking about, and it never occurs to him that this somewhat important item of information is not conveyed to the mind of his auditor by any kind of intuition. It is remarkable what expert guessers long practice has made most Chinese, in reading a meaning into words which do not convey it, by the simple practice of supplying subjects or predicates as they happen to be lacking. It is often the most important word in the whole sentence which is suppressed, the clue to which may be entirely un- known. There is very frequently nothing in the form of the sentences, the manner of the speaker, his tone of voice, nor in any concomitant circumstance, to indicate that the subject has changed, and yet one suddenly discovers that the speaker is not now speaking of himself as he was a moment ago, but of his grandfather, who lived in the days of Tao Kuang. How the speaker got there, and also how he got back again, often remains an insoluble mystery, but we see the feat accom- plished every day. To a Chinese there is nothing more re- markable in a sudden, invisible leap, without previous notice, from one topic, one person, one century to another, than in the ability of a man who is watching an insect on the window- pane to observe at the same time and without in the least de- flecting his eyes, a herd of cattle situated in the same line of vision on a distant hill.
