BOOTHIA FELIX AND THE ESQUIMAUX.

safety, and Captain Ross and his companions, after all their dangers and hardships, were warmly welcomed home by their countrymen, who had long given them up for lost.

THE CHINESE.

Ar the very opposite side of the globe from us, there is a very large country called China, where all the tea that is used grows. The Chinese are an exceedingly remarkable people; they had been a civilized nation many hundreds of years, when our forefathers were savages, living naked in the woods. Their language is quite different from that spoken by any other people, and so is their writing; for each letter stands for a word, and they begin at the top of a page, and instead of writing across, make their lines straight down, from the top to the bottom. In very early times they had found out many useful inventions, such as the art of printing, the mariner's compass, gunpowder,

and several ingenious manufactures; but what is very strange, instead of going forward in their discoveries, and becoming more and more civilized, as the nations of Europe have done, they seem all at once to have stood still, and to be just the same people now-no wiser, no more skilful, no more polished, than they were a thousand years ago.

We have been indebted to the Chinese for several useful things, which are now become so common that we could scarcely do without them. Porcelain is one of these, which is indeed commonly called china; our cups and saucers are made of it: it is a peculiar kind of earth, which is made into a paste, moulded into shape, and burnt in a furnace. The tea that we drink out of these vessels is, as I have said before, entirely the produce of China. Tea is the leaves of a small shrub, dried; and you may imagine the importance of it, when I tell you, that thirty-two millions of pounds weight are brought into this country every year! Silk was originally made in China also; you are perhaps