96 TRAVEL, ADVENTURE, AND SPORT. 



who happen to be separated, collect together if they 

 can at all manage it. Their accounts are all settled, 

 and no debt is allowed to pass without some satis- 

 factory arrangement. Their houses are ornamented 

 with lanterns and flowers, and offerings are placed on 

 their family altars. Their very ages date from the 

 New Year, and in every way they strive to make it a 

 time of new birth. To me it was more interesting to 

 turn away on this occasion from the large residences 

 with their fire-crackers and gaudy lanterns, their wine- 

 parties and silk dresses, to the humble dwellings of 

 the poor. There was something touching in the 

 aspect of some of these clean-swept hovels, with their 

 solitary little paper lantern at the door, and a couple , 

 of oranges, a few dried olives, a handful of red flowers, 

 and a very thin smoking joss-stick on the household 

 altar. Perhaps the only difference in the grand- 

 mother's patched clothes was that they had been 

 washed for the occasion ; but the faces of some of 

 these Chinese peasant-women become absolutely beau- 

 tiful in extreme old age, and they look a great deal 

 nearer heaven than some dowagers to be seen else- 

 where. There I would find coolies who had trudged 

 from Hong-Kong or Canton to see their aged parents ; 

 and all the toils and troubles of the members of the 

 family were related to each other's sympathising ears. 

 I do not envy the man who can be moved to scorn at 

 the sight of honest poverty striving to keep up the 

 little formalities of its station, to be as respectable 



