he now sets forth the destruction of the state, which is heaven's warning to your Majesty."

Hereupon the king again asked, "If I now condone the crimes of the Kiang and Jung tribes, dismiss the levy at Tai-yuen, burn up the arms and ammunition in the arsenals, and forbid the people making or selling more, will these omens be neutralized ?" Peh Yang-fu replied, "I have ascertained from the stars that these omens relate to something already accomplished; I think it is within the palace, and does not mean wars and weapons in the country. A queen will hereafter disturb the government; for the ditty had it, 'The moon is coming up, The sun is going down.' Now the sun indicates a prince, and the moon refers to the yin or female; to have the sun wane and the moon wax, shows the advancement of the yin to the weakening of the yang, a clear indication of a female arising to govern." The king responded, "We have intrusted the government of the six palaces to Queen Kiang, whose uprightness and virtue are known; she rules all in the hareem as she pleases, dismissing and selecting at her will. How then can evil by a female arise in that quarter ?" Peh rejoined, "The ditty said, 'Is coming up, is going down,'-which does not refer to our times. Further, it is not a fixed expression; and if your Majesty now upholds virtue to avert them, the evil omens will be changed to happy ones, and the arms need not be burned or destroyed."

King Siuen heard their representations, half doubting, half believing, and in no pleasant mood dismissed the audience, and returned to the palace. Queen Kiang met him; and after sitting a while, he minutely related the words of his ministers. She observed that an unusual event had just happened in the palace, which she had been wishing to relate, and then went on to say: "An old woman shut up in the palace, a concubine of the late king's, over fifty years old, became pregnant some forty years ago, and was last night delivered of a girl." Greatly startled, he asked where the girl was, and she told him that deeming such a thing unlucky, she had already ordered it to be wrapped in a mat and carried out some seven miles to be thrown into the River Tsing-shui. He then sent for the old woman herself to come to the palace, to ask her respecting the circumstances. She came, and kneeling before him, said, “I have heard that in the last year of King Kieh of the House of Hia (B. C. 1765), a divine personage in Pao-ching, transformed himself into two dragons, which

came down upon the palace; they frothed spittle, and spoke human words to Kieh, telling him they were the lords of Paoching. In his alarm, wishing to kill them, he ordered the astrologer to divine what unlucky thing would happen if he did so; or what evil would occur if he drove them away. The astrologer said, A divine personage coming down is a happy omen for your Majesty; why do you not ask for his spittle, and lay it up, for the spittle is the energy of a dragon, and if kept carefully will bring good luck. Kieh then bade him again to divine what luck would come of it, and laid out silks in sacrifice to them, placing a golden vessel to receive the spittle, which was then stored in a red casket. Soon after a rain storm arose, and the dragons disappeared; the king ordered the vessel of spittle to be put in the treasury. Throughout 644 years in the Shang dynasty, and for about 300 years of this family, no one had opened this vessel; when in the last year of his late Majesty, a brilliant light issued from the treasury. The treasurer reported it, and in answer to his Majesty, looked over the old records, and told him that it probably came from the vessel of spittle. The king ordered it to be brought out for examination. An attendant broke open the golden casket, and handed him the golden dish inside, when just as he was holding out his hand, it slipped and fell. The spittle flowed out along the ground in the hall, and then instantly changed into a wee-wee tortoise; the dish itself turned over in the entry. The attendants pursued, but the tortoise ran into the hareem, and got out of sight. At that time, I was about twelve years old, and as I stepped in its track, I felt a quickening. Not many months after, the king, shocked at my appearance, seeing I had no husband, shut me up in the black-hole, where I have remained for forty years. Last night I felt a pain, and presently gave birth to a daughter, which the chamberlain, not daring to keep secret or falsify, made known only to her Majesty. She, regarding the thing as evil, said it must not be kept, and ordered the chamberlain to have it carried off and drowned in the moat. My crime doubtless deserves a thousand deaths." Siuen-wang said the affair related to the previous reign, and had nothing to do with her; and so sent her off. At the same time he ordered the chamberlain to go to the river and see if he could find the infant. He erelong returned to say that it had floated away; and this allayed the king's suspicions. The next morning at court, he told the astrologer Peh the affair about the dragon's spittle, and added,

The girl has been drowned. Do you, however, endeavor to learn from a sortilege what such a strange elf can forebode, and how the evil omen can be removed. Peh made the divination, and handed it to him in a stanza:

Wailing and then laughing;
Laughing and then wailing;

A sheep swallowed by a devil,
A horse driven by a dog.

Take care! Take care!

Mulberry bows, bamboo quivers.

Siuen-wang not understanding these words, Peh said, "It is through the twelve branches that I explain them; there the sheep relates to the character wi, the horse to wu; wailing and weeping are signs of grief and joy, which ought consequently to occur in the 31st and 32d years of the sexagenary cycle. As I understand the prognostics, although this elfish sprite has gone from the palace, it has not yet been exorcised."* When Siuen-wang heard this explanation, he was much disturbed, and issued orders that search should be made in every house in and out of the city; and whoever brought the girl alive or dead to the palace should be rewarded with 300 pieces of cloth, and as many of silk for his trouble; but whoever harbored her and did not report it, the one who did make it known should receive the same reward, while the neighborhood or village should be razed, and the criminal with his family executed. He commanded Tu Peh, the governor, himself to superintend this matter. Seeing, too, that the ballad contained the expression, "mulberry bows, bamboo quivers," he further required Tso Yu, the lieutenant-governor, to order the overseer of markets to go through all the bazaars and stalls, forbidding the manufacture and sale of bows made of the wild mulberry, or quivers woven of bamboo, under the penalty of death. The overseer without delay took a posse of lictors, and went around making known the orders and searching whom he could seize. None of the citizens in town ventured to disobey; but some villagers had not learned the orders. When he went on his rounds the next day, he met a woman bearing a bundle of quivers which she had recently woven of splints, and behind her came a man carrying ten or more bows made of wild mulberry wood. They had come from a distant village, and were hastening into the city to make

*The full explanation of this reply, which seems so vague and silly to us, would involve a longer account of the sexagenary cycle, the horary characters, and their influence on times, fates, man, etc., than is worth while.

their sales before the market was over, and had not entered the gate, when the overseer met them face to face, and seized them. The lictors first took the woman to bind her, and the man seeing something in the wind, threw down his bundle of bows and ran away; she was then taken, and the bows and quivers with her, before Tso Yu. He, seeing that the things were just those mentioned in the ditty, and further that the chief astrologer had spoken of disaster coming from a woman, and she had just been arrested, so that everything exactly corresponded to the imperial proclamation, concealed the case of the man, and merely reported that a woman had been found transgressing the order, and ought to be sentenced to death. The king therefore commanded her to be decapitated, and the bows and quivers to be burned in the market-place, as a warning to all who might make or sell them. Some one wrote a stanza on this incident:

It was not by just rule that he changed Heaven's will,
But by minding the ditty, and destroying a woman;
Who will say that any success could atone for such wrong,

And where's the statesman who will sternly exclaim against it?

Having told what became of the woman, we return to the man, who sold the mulberry bows. Seized with terror he fled, but not knowing the reason why the overseer had arrested his wife, he still wished to learn some news of her, and remained over night at a village a league from the city. Next morning a man related how a woman had been seized near the north gate for transgressing the orders not to make or sell mulberry bows and grass quivers, and had been immediately punished. Sure from this account that his wife was dead already, he escaped into the wilderness, now weeping bitter tears of grief, and anon feeling a gleam of joy that he had escaped the like fate. Walking on a league or more, he came to the River Tsing-shui, where looking towards the horizon he descried a flock of white birds flying about; and coming close up, saw a matted bundle floating along. The birds were pecking at it as they screamed over it, and in this way they gradually pushed it along towards the shore. The man uttered. an exclamation of surprise, and driving them off, brought the drifting bundle to the grassy bank. On opening it he heard a plaintive cry, and unrolling the babe in it, cried out, "Who can have thus thrown away this little girl, which these birds have been pecking at as it drifted along? She must belong to some rich family, but I will carry her home to bring up, and I hope she will by-and-by

grow to be a woman." Then unwrapping her down to the clothes, he nestled the infant in his bosom, and concluded to leave a region in which he had met so many misfortunes, and make the best of his way to Pao-ching, where he had some acquaintances. Upon this girl's singular preservation, old Mr. Yen has this single stanza: For forty years she slowly matured in the womb,

And three days she quietly floated down the stream;
Born an elfin sprite, she was an omen to her country;
What royal law could countervail Heaven's plan?

Siuen-wang, having executed the woman who sold bows and quivers, concluded that the ballad was now fulfilled, and felt at his ease, thinking no longer of carrying out his plan of levying troops at Tai-yuen. For several years after, there is no record of important events, till the 43d year of his reign. When the great sacrifice took place that year, King Siuen was spending the night in the hall of fasting, as usage required. It was now the second watch, all noises were hushed in stillness, when he suddenly saw a beautiful girl come in from the western side, and stealthily glide directly into the court. Though he was surprised at this bold infraction of the rules of fasting, he called out to her with a loud voice, and bade his attendant to seize her. No one answered his call, and the girl showing no fear, went on her way into the great ancestral hall. Thrice she laughed aloud and thrice she wept bitterly, when quietly and deliberately taking down seven of the ancestral tablets and binding them in a bundle, she turned to the east and went away. The monarch rose to pursue her himself, when the shock awoke him to find out that it was all a dream. He felt in very low spirits, and forced himself to enter the ancestral hall to go through with the prescribed ceremonies.

After completing the nine offerings, he returned to the hall of Fasting to change his robes, and sent an attendant to privately ask the astrologer Peh to come in, to whom he told his dream. Peh replied, "Has your Majesty forgotten the words of the boys' ballad, which you heard three years ago? I said there would certainly come some disaster by means of a woman, that the gnome was not yet exorcised; and how that the ballad spoke of wailing and laughing, which is exactly accordant with what your Majesty has now dreamed." "But did not the death of the woman suffice to satisfy and prove the sortilege of the mulberry bows and bamboo quivers?" inquired Siuen.

"The great doctrine is mysterious and far-reaching; we must