Leaves From My Chinese Scrapbook.

Mr. Balfour says in his first page that not one man in ten thousand knows the smallest trifle about China; and, although this statement may be somewhat hyperbolical if taker literally and in view of the proportion which the population of China bears to that of the whole world, it is certainly a fact that the knowledge most foreign residents have of the country and people, s much akin to that which the casual sojourner by the seaside has of the wonders of the deep. He is familiar, indeed, with the varying aspects of that portion of the surface which lies immediately before him, its gaiety and gloom, its calms and tempests; but of the secrets of its teeming life, and the myriad subjects of engrossing interest, which only await research to become his own, he is apt to be extremely ignorant. As the dweller by the seaside has the sum of his pleasures largely increased by studying the natural objects which come under his notice, so the foreigner in China will find much monotony relieved and many delightful and unexpected sources of enjoyment opened up by penetrating a little beneath the surface of the life which surges around him. Mr. Balfour's is eminently the book to act as an incentive to such enquiries