ng
eunuchs and serving maids, should have been a spoiled child; the wonder
is that he was not worse than he was.

One day in 1901 while the court was absent at Hsian, and the front gate
of the Forbidden City was guarded by our "boys in blue," I obtained a
pass and visited the imperial palace. The apartments of the Emperor
consisted of a series of one-story Chinese buildings, with paper
windows around a large central pane of glass, tile roof and brick
floor. The east part of the building appeared to be the living-room,
about twenty by twenty-five feet. The window on the south side extended
the entire length of the room, and was filled with clocks from end to
end. There were clocks of every description from the finest French
cloisonne to the most intricate cuckoo clocks from which a bird hopped
forth to announce the hour, and each ticking its own time regardless of
every other. Tables were placed in various parts of the room, on each
of which were one, two or three clocks. Swiss watches of the most
curious and unique designs hung about the walls. Two sofas sat back to
back in the centre of the room, and a beautiful little gilt desk on
which was the most wonderful of all his clocks, with several large
foreign chairs upholstered in plush and velvet, completed the
furniture. I sat down in one of these chairs to rest, for it was a hot
summer day, and immediately there proceeded from beneath me sweet
strains of music from a box concealed beneath the cushion. It was not
only a surprise, it was soothing and restful; and I was prepared to see
an electric fan pop out of somewhere and fan me to sleep. It was really
an Oriental fairy tale of an apartment.

As Kuang Hsu grew to boyhood he heard that out in this great wonderful
world, which he had never seen except with the eyes of a child, there
was a method of sending messages to distant cities and provinces with
the rapidity of a flash of lightning. For centuries he and his
ancestors had been sending their edicts, and their Peking Gazette or
court newspaper--the oldest journal in the world--by runner, or relays
of post horses, and the possibility of sending them by a lightning
flash appealed to him. He believed in doing things, and, as we shall
see later, he wanted to do them as rapidly as they could be done. He
therefore ordered that a telegraph outfit be secured for him, which he
"played with" as he had done with his most ingenious toys, and the
telegraph was soon established f