NOTHING is more striking in China than the weary, worn looks of the women—European, I mean. Why they should fade, whilst English men with rosy cheeks bloom in perennial youth, so that I not uncommonly take men of thirty-five for boys of twenty-two, has exercised my mind ever since I first caught sight of the European community on the Shanghai race-course. Now coming to Chefoo has, I think, at last explained it. English ladies in China live tightly girt, and gant-de-Suéded, just as if they were going to drive out in a carriage and take a turn in Hyde Park with the thermometer in the sixties. Now, as for months together here the thermometer seems to be in the eighties or nineties, this simply means that for months together the ladies here take next to no exercise, and in some cases none. No small proportion of them neither play lawn tennis nor ride. Meanwhile the men are walking, rowing, bathing, shooting, playing cricket, tennis, etc., etc., and hence, I imagine, the rosy cheeks of the one and the pale weariness of the others.