but finds with them its appropriate reaction--equal but opposite.
Indeed, to one anxious of conforming to the manners and customs of
the country, the only road to right lies in following unswervingly
that course which his inherited instincts assure him to be wrong.

Yet these people are human beings; with all their eccentricities
they are men. Physically we cannot but be cognizant of the fact, nor
mentally but be conscious of it. Like us, indeed, and yet so unlike
are they that we seem, as we gaze at them, to be viewing our own
humanity in some mirth-provoking mirror of the mind,--a mirror that
shows us our own familiar thoughts, but all turned wrong side out.
Humor holds the glass, and we become the sport of our own reflections.
But is it otherwise at home? Do not our personal presentments mock
each of us individually our lives long? Who but is the daily dupe of
his dressing-glass, and complacently conceives himself to be a very
different appearing person from what he is, forgetting that his
right side has become his left, and vice versa? Yet who, when by
chance he catches sight in like manner of the face of a friend,
can keep from smiling at the caricatures which the mirror's
left-for-right reversal makes of the asymmetry of that friend's
features,--caricatures all the more grotesque for being utterly
unsuspected by their innocent original? Perhaps, could we once see
ourselves as others see us, our surprise in the case of foreign
peoples might be less pronounced.

Regarding, then, the Far Oriental as a man, and not simply as a
phenomenon, we discover in his peculiar point of view a new
importance,--the possibility of using it stereoptically. For his
mind-photograph of the world can be placed side by side with ours,
and the two pictures combined will yield results beyond what either