How a Chinese Boy Goes to School.
By A. F. Martin
A CHINESE home is not a hot-bed for the development of mind. Nature is left to take her own time, and the child vegetates until he completes his seventh or eighth year. The almanac is then consulted, and a lucky day chosen for inducting the lad into a life of study. Clad in festal robe, and tasseled cap, and looking a mandarin in small, he sets out for the village school, his face beaming with the happy assurance that all the stars are shedding kindly influence, and his friends predicting that he will end his career in the Imperial Academy. On entering the room he performs two acts of worship; the first is to prostrate himself before a picture of the Great Sage, who is venerated as the fountain of wisdom, but is not supposed to exercise over his votaries anything like tutelar supervision. The second is to salute with the same forms, and almost equal reverence, the teacher who is to guide his inexperienced feet in the pathway to knowledge. In no country is the office of teacher more revered. Not only is the living instructor saluted with forms of profoundest respect, but the very name of teacher, taken in the abstract, is an object of almost idolatrous homage. On certain occasions it is inscribed on a tablet in connection with the characters for heaven, earth, prince, and parents, generally as one of the five chief objects of veneration, and worshiped with solemn rites. This is a relic of the primitive period, when books were few and the student dependent for everything on the oral teaching of his sapient master.—Rev. A. F. Martin.