| Of the many Chinamen in New York not a few keep cigar stands upon the sidewalks. Their neighbors in trade are the Milesian apple-women. Twenty-eight of these apple-women have gone the way of matrimony with their elephant-eyed, olive-skinned contemporaries, and the most of them are now happy mothers in consequence. The physiologists aver that the human being is improved, as is the domestic branch of the quadrupedal animals, by "crossing." If this be true—and we suspect that it is—the natives of this country ought to be remarkable for physical strength and beauty, for surely there was never such a mixture of races in any part of the world. Representatives of all nations have located and married here. We know of two Bedouin Arabs, part of an exhibiting troupe that came to this country several years ago, who married wives and are rearing offspring in one of the Hudson river counties. Siam has its representatives here in the famous twins, and in one of the up-town streets a wealthy native of Morocco domiciliates with a Westchester county spouse. The mixture of Dutch, Italian, French, Spanish, English, Irish, Danish, Swedish, etc., is perfectly bewildering; but the amalgamation of the Irish and the Chinese is more than bewildering—it begets a chaos of ideas from which no ray of intelligibility can be safely eliminated. Imagine a scion of this stock chatting gayly about "Josh" in one moment, and speaking of his father Pin Sing Chi, and in the next whirling a shillelah at a primary election, and swearing that he goes in, tooth and nail, or rather body and breeches, for the nomination of his mother’s brother, Patrick O’Dowd. Oh, what a country is this! |
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