heard sobbing and crying, and desiring to alleviate grief, I inquired who was ill. The man, suppressing a smile, said: "It is a young girl just about leaving her father's house to be married, and she is lamenting with a party of her fellows." I thought, after these unlucky essays, I would ask no more questions; but carefully use my eyes instead. Looking into a shop, I saw a stout strapping fellow sewing lace on a bonnet; and going on to the landing-place, behold, there all the ferry-boats were rowed by women; and from a passage-boat just arrived, I saw the fema lesget out of the cabin which was in the bow. "What are we coming to next?" said I, and just by I saw a carpenter take his foot-rule out of his stocking, to measure some timber, which his apprentice was cutting with a saw that hade blade set nearly at right angles with the frame. Before his door sat a man busily engaged in whitening the soles of a pair of shoes with white lead. We next passed a fashionable lady who was just stepping out of her chair, hobbling, I should rather say; for unlike our ladies with their compressed waists, her feet were not above three inches long; and her gown, instead of having gores sewed into the bottom, was so contracted by embroidered plaits as apparently to restrain her walking. "Come let us return home," said I, "for I am quite whirled about in this strange land." This sketch will somewhat illustrate a Chinaman's ideas of propriety; it is very manifest from it that there is no accounting for or reasoning against tastes, and that if we wish to judge fairly of many things that he does, and of many of his notions, some knowledge of their ration le is desirable. If this his outer man is unlike what we deem good taste, we shall find, alas, that his inner man is much more unlike, much further estranged from what we are taught to regard as (and know to be) good morals. MODE OF MAKING WALLS AND WALKS. The Chinese have a substitute for stone or brick pavements, called by foreigners chunam, derived from an Indian word meaning lime, from the use of lime in its composition, and which they call sha huuy, or "sanded lime." It is made by mixing sifted sand with quicklime in the proportion. of about 15 to 1, and thoroughly working them together with a hoe, occasionally sprinkling the heap. It is then thinly spread upon the ground, and beat very solid with a kind of wooden peels, now and then wetting the place to assist the solidification. The materials for walls are the same, but the gravel is rather coarser. In constructing a wall, boards are set within posts on each side of the foundation just the thickness of the intended wall, and the prepared gravel poured in and pounded down solid with long heavy beaters. When full to the top of the boards, additional ones are placed above them, and the process repeated, till by successive increments the wall is done. When thoroughly dry, it is coated with coarse plaster for preservation from rain, and if the coating is well done, the wall becomes in time very hard and stony. Besides the usual mode of laying brick to make the walls of dwellings, either plastered or not, houses are also constructed in the same manner of this sanded lime; but more commonly tiers of bricks are loosely laid in to render it more substantial, and the whole covered with plaster, and whitewashed. In places where burned bricks are expensive, the people have devised a substitute, viz., large blocks made of disintegrated felspar and lime. Localities often occur in the granitic strata in this region where the felspar predominates, and, by exposure, has disintegrated and fallen down in the form of coarse clay. The workman brings his tools to the place, consisting of a sliding wooden form of the size of his intended bricks, and a long beater. He turns up the clayey felspar, and mixing more or less lime with it as he sees fit, pours the same into the mould, and pounds it in as solid as possible; then opening the frame, he dries the mass in the sun. These blocks are about 14 inches long by 6 square, and sell for $3 to 3 a hundred. Almost all the houses on the island of Hongkong are built of this material, which in dry situations answers well enough to sustain a roof, and shelter the inmates from wind and rain; but when a freshet flows into a village of such dwellings, it soon causes them to be dissolved, an event by no means unknown in some seasons. A LAMPOON. The following satirical piece was written and circulated soon after the riot in Canton, Dec. 12th, 1838, to which the ninth and tenth lines refer. The two persons named in the third and fourth lines were notorious opium dealers, and while holding office were supposed to be screened by Gov. Tang, who, from them and others of the inferior magistracy, is charged with having received "three tens and six," or 36,000 taels per month for the use of the revenue cutters for purposes of smuggling. It is a pretty close translation: In truth, there's no luck at all in Canton, For Tingching in governor's hall is found, Who, of Cheih Shakwang, is the well known patron, ARTICLE IV. THE WOMEN OF ITALY. From the Foreign Quarterly Review, October, 1841. La Donna Saggia ed Amabile. Libri Tre di Anna Pepoli, Vedova Sampieri. Capolago, Tipografia Elveica. 1838. If it were always permitted to draw an obvious inference from the most irrefutable precedents, without incurring the sneers of skepticism, we might almost venture to affirm that the days of man upon earth are drawing to a close, and that the long-dreaded millennium is at hand. Yet a few more efforts of mechanical ingenuity and the plough will ride unguided over the field like a railway train, steamers will glide like ducks over the waters without noise or smoke, and balloons will be curbed and bridled like Ariosto's hippogriffs. e Already the influence of climate has been utterly neutralized. Our coal has been made to answer all the purposes of an Italian sun. It has all its warmth, its light, its life. England has become the metropolis of the vegetable kingdom, and the horticultural gardens at Chiswick the flora of both continents. A shop in Regent street has been turned into nature's own workshop, exhibiting within its genial temperature all the mysteries of an artificial maternity. Mr. Espy of Philadelphia has thrown his spell over the storms and offers to sell rain by the bucket to the highest bidder. In short, it will go hard with us if, ere we are many years older, we do not see the isthmuses of Suez and Panama cut through, a rail-road tunnel driven through the bowels of the Alps, and a suspension-bridge launched across the Atlantic. Then will there be rest for man and beast. Then will men grow weary of watching with folded arms the progress of their self-acting tailoring apparatus, and, impatient of a state of inactivity inconsistent with their nature, they will, like Alexander, complain that their fathers left nothing for them to do, and look out for another world, the earth being much too narrow for them. Nor do we hesitate to affirm that the moral improvement of the human race has kept pace with physical discovery. The teetotallers strive boldly to undo the work of Noah. Wilberforce has raised the patriarch's curse from the heads of the devoted children of Canaan; the peace-societies hope to rivet the sword of war to its scabbard and to turn all the nations of the earth into a vast Quaker community. Reason and justice are soon to obtain an undisputed ascendency over force. The Russians will be made to feel the propriety of withdrawing from Poland, the Austrians will suffer themselves to be talked out of Italy. The French are raising a Chinese wall round Paris, to save them the trouble of fighting for their country. All ancient grievances will be amicably settled. All nations will vie with each other in forgetting old grudges, and redressing timesanctioned injustices. But the most natural as well as the most glorious result of this voluntary abnegation of the right of the strongest will be the cessation of an abuse of power as ancient as Eden, a revolution to be operated by the suppression of a single word in the marriage ceremony, the rehabilitation of a much injured being into its natural rights-the emancipation of woman. Already the champions of the trampled sex, the Chapmans and Martineaus, have unfolded the standard of independence. Having at first trained themselves to public controversy in the cause of abolitionism, they soon learnt to stand up, like Cicero, pro domo sua, in vindication of their inalienable right of sitting in senates and parliaments and being elbowed and squeezed on the hustings. Another more formidable combatant, the fair authoress of "Woman and her Master," after searching in the treasures of the past with unwearied diligence, has fully demonstrated that woman in all ages and countries (not excepting even such characters as Aspasia and Messalina) has been and is a middle creature between a lamb and an angel, perverted, fettered and tortured by another selfish being, half-demon, half-brute. She has raised Medea's war-cry: πάντων δ' ὄσ' ἔστ' ἔμψυχα, καὶ γνώμην ἔχει, γυναῖκες ἐσμὲν ἀθλιώτατον φυτόν. With all our heart do we congratulate these lovely emancipators on the favorable prospect that every thing is taking before them, and wish them a speedy success in an enterprise which, as it would most powerfully contribute to bring about that new order of things, that golden age of peace and justice which has been hitherto considered incompatible with the frailty of human nature, would be the most infallible sign of the forthcoming close of time. Female writers in England, France and America are pretty nearly a match for their male opponents, and if the sword is to be definitely laid aside and the field open for a fair and impartial discussion, we have no doubt but women will in the end talk men out of countenance. But to whatever extent these ladies may carry their female radicalism, they will easily perceive that their social reforms will not be immediately applicable to all countries alike; and as we hear every day of nations being unripe for the blessing of liberal institutions, as we see statesmen insisting on the necessity of fitting a people for better destinies by the gradual influence of civilization and culture, so it will be likewise understood that the fair sex cannot be everywhere equally ready for an immediate enfranchisement, and that, for instance, the Georgian slave of an eastern harem could not be as easily trained to take her share in the weighty deliberations of the sublime Porte, as a Yankee girl might be called to sit among the members of Congress. These reflections were awakened in our mind at the sight of the work of which the title stands at the head of the present article, and we were curious to ascertain what notions concerning woman's mission might be entertained by a lady born and bred up in a country in which the persons of her sex are kept in something like a middle station between oriental seclusion and-what would strike every other traveller but Miss Martineau as the total independence of American women. We like to look over a book written by a lady. There is, we believe, an immense tract of unknown world in the female heart; there exists between these two sexes, created so essentially to belong to and to be necessary to each other, to share all hopes and fears, all cares and enjoyments of life, a barrier of conventional dignity and propriety, of sexual etiquette, which almost every lover and husband flatters himself with removing, but which perhaps no living man ever succeeded in so doing, and which we do not know but it were perhaps unadvisable that any one should attempt to remove. Yet it is but too natural that we should all stand on tiptoe to catch a glimpse of this terra incognita, and we would willingly renounce all the pleasure derivable from one of Captain Parry's voyages to the North Pole, or from an American South Sea expedition, to be enabled to overhear, without indelicacy, a conversation between two fair "bosom-friends" in some trying and unguarded moment, or to possess the key to that magic telegraph of nods and winks and smiles by which two female spirits commune with each other before company, to the utter mystification of the duller sex. Next to this would be the other no less unhallowed gratification of intercepting one of those four page, small-hand, close-written, cross-lined feminine epistles, to the uninitiated conveying scarcely any meaning at all, but where, in every turning in every letter, the corresponding parties are enabled to decipher so much more than meets the eye." Next to this, again, is the pleasure of perusing the works of a female author; for although the fair writer, knowing that her page is to stand the full glare of broad daylight, may be constantly on her guard lest she should by any involuntary indiscretion jeopardize the secret interests of the community, yet some unlucky expression, some half-word may, in the heat of inspiration, happen to drop from her pen, which will shoot like wild-fire across the benighted understanding of a man who can read, and do more than an age of learning towards his initiation into the mysteries of female freemasonry. Of these voluntary confessions and involuntary revelations, thanks to heaven, in our own country, we have enough; and the new novels and essays by ladies, misses and mistresses, issuing every year from the English press, bid fair to leave scarcely one fold of the female heart unexplored, scarcely one blush of the maiden's cheek unaccounted for. But if this be the case in Old and New England as well as in France and Germany, the same can hardly be said of the Italian peninsula, where, with the exception of a very few Petrarchesque poetesses, and a still fewer moral ascetic writers, man seems still almost completely to monopolize the trade of book-making. |