After noticing the simplicity of spirit and careful attention to details in these letters, it is touching to read this later one:
"For successive years I have had my memorials to the Throne copied and filed away. I am now selecting the more important ones to be carefully copied for your use. Together with my letters I trust you will have them carefully deposited at home, so that they can be handed down from generation to generation of our descendants. But the letters to you and your brothers especially are on no account to be cut in boards or printed for the perusal of others. Very few of these letters or memorials are worthy of public notice. The series of essays and poems which I have written after the style of the ancient worthies, and collected in a volume entitled _Li T'uan Chai_, has been copied, and can be given to others for inspection. It will soon be printed, and disposed of for general circulation. But the letters, memorials, and essays outside of that volume are to be sacredly preserved. Some of these were written when I was a young man, and my style was unformed. Their publication would bring no glory to the family. If any of our friends should crave their perusal, you will in courteous language decline to allow them to be seen."
His directions were disregarded, or we should not have these letters. There is a whole book full of them; but these few extracts will give some insight into the nature of a very exemplary Chinese father's admonitions, perhaps even more from what he leaves out than from what he says. The son thus carefully trained seems in every way to have done credit to his father. One of his sons, again a lad of singular charm and great promise, died early; another seems more pleasant than distinguished. His nephew and adopted son is one of the prominent, though possibly not leading, members of the party of progress in Shanghai.
Monastery near Ichang.--For the Dead.--Near Ningpo.--Buddhist Service--T'ien Dong.--Omi Temples.--Sai King Shan.--Monastery of the Particoloured Cliff.
The country round Ichang has always some special beauty, and in autumn it is the tints, shown to especial advantage on the tallow-trees. But one day we gathered by the wayside lovely anemones, still lingering on in sheltered spots; large gentians, with their edges picked out into delicate feathery streamers such as one finds in picotees, the little yellow originator of all the garden chrysanthemums; China asters; China daisies; the cunningly placed red berries of the spindle-tree; and branches crowded with the fairylike red berries of the Chinese hawthorn. And yet we were in the weird, arid, conglomerate region, where, as the botanist of the party said, no flower would dream of growing that could grow anywhere else. The Cherokee roses were no longer in bloom. Are these innocent, white, large roses at the bottom of the American horror of Chinese immigration? It may be remembered that, originating from China, they spread over America with such rapidity that it was assumed they must be of native origin, and from their aggressive nature they were given the name, by which they are still known, of Cherokee.