proper kind of talk!" It was not till some time afterwards that the discovery was made that the point of the offence against good manners lay in the implied hint that if the fire had come too near it might have burned the cash-shop, which would have been most unlucky, and the very contemplation of which, albeit in congratulatory language, was therefore taboo! A foreigner who was spending a short time in the capital met a drove of camels, among which was a baby camel. Turning to the driver of the cart, who had been for many years in the employ of foreigners, he said: "When you come back to the house, tell my little boy to come out and look at this little camel, as he has never seen one, and it will amuse him very much." After a considerable lapse of time, during which, as in the last case, the idea was undergoing slow fermentation, the carter replied thoughtfully: "If you should buy the camel, you could not raise it—it would be sure to die!"
The writer was once present at a service in Chinese, when the speaker treated the subject of the cure of Naaman. He pictured the scene as the great Syrian general arrived at the door of Elisha's house, and represented the attendants striv- ing to gain admittance for their master. Struggling to make this as pictorial as possible, the speaker cried out dramatically, on behalf of the Syrian servants, "Gatekeeper, open the door; the Syrian general has come!" To the speaker's surprise a man in the rear seat disappeared at this point as if he had been shot out, and it subsequently appeared that this person had laboured under a misunderstanding. He was the gate- keeper of the premises, and oblivious of what had gone before, on hearing himself suddenly accosted he had rushed out with commendable promptness to let in Naaman!
Not less erroneous were the impressions of another auditor of a missionary in one of the central provinces, who wished to produce a profound impression upon his audience by showing with the stereopticon a highly magnified representation of a
