warders,
officers of the King of Death, and one of them was laughing. And the other
asked why he laughed, and he replied:

"I laugh at the Emperor, who thinks to escape our master, not knowing that
the moment of his decease was engraved with a pen of iron upon a rock of
adamant a million million years or ever this world was."

"And when comes it?" asked the other.

"In ten minutes," said the first.

When the Emperor heard this he was wild with terror, and tottered to the
couch on which the Sleeping Beauty lay. "Oh, awake!" he cried, "awake and
save me ere it is too late!" And, oh wonder! the sleeper stirred, and
opened her eyes.

If she had been so beautiful while sleeping, what was she when awake! But
the love of life had overcome the love of beauty in the Emperor's bosom,
and he saw not the eyes like stars, and the bloom as of peaches and lilies,
or the aspect grand and smiling as daybreak. He could only cry, "Give me
the potion, lest I die, give me the potion!"

"That cannot I," she said. "The secret was known only to my daughter."

"Who is thy daughter?"

"The hoary woman, she who slept with me in the cavern."

"That aged crone thy daughter, daughter to thee so youthful and so fresh?

"Even so," she said, "I bore her at sixteen, and slumbered for seventy
years. When I awoke she was withered and decrepit: I youthful as when I
closed my eyes. But she had learned the secret, which I never knew."

"The Bonze shall be crucified!" yelled the Emperor.

"It is too late," said she; "he is torn in pieces already."

"By whom?"

"By the multitude that are now coming to do the like unto thee."

And as she spoke the doors were burst open, and in rushed the people,
headed by the most pious Bonze in the Empire (after the late Principal
Bonze), who plunged a sword into the Emperor's breast, exclaiming:

"He who despises this life in comparison with another deserves to lose the
life which he has." Words, saith the historian Li, which have been thought
worthy to be inscribed in letters of gold in the Hall of Confucius.

And the people were crying, "Kill the sorceress!" But she looked upon them,
and they cried, "Be our Empress!"

"Remember," said she, "that ye will have to bear with me for a hundred
years!"

"Would," said they, "that it might be a hundred thousand!"

So she took the sceptre, and reigned gloriously. Among her good acts is
enumerated her toleration of the followers of Lao-tsze. Since, however,
th