hose days was on the lookout for everything foreign
that was of a mechanical nature. Indeed every invention interested him.
In this respect he was diametrically opposite to the genius of the
whole Chinese people. Their faces had ever been turned backward, and
their highest hopes were that they might approximate the golden ages of
the past, and be equal in virtue to their ancestors. This feeling was
so strong that a hundred years before he mounted the throne, his
forefather, Chien Lung, when he had completed his cycle of sixty years
as a ruler, vacated in favour of his son lest he should reign longer
than his grandfather. Kuang Hsu was therefore the first occupant of the
dragon throne whose face was turned to the future, and whose chief aim
was to possess and to master every method that had enabled the peoples
of the West to humiliate his people.

When he heard that the foreigners had a method of talking to a distance
of ten, twenty, fifty or five hundred miles, he did not say like the
old farmer is reported to have said,--"It caint be trew, because my son
John kin holler as loud as any man in all this country, an' he caint be
heerd mor'n two miles." Kuang Hsu believed it, and at once ordered that
a telephone be secured for him.

In 1894 the Christian women of China decided to present a New Testament
to the Empress Dowager on her sixtieth birthday which occurred the
following year. New type was prepared, the finest foreign paper
secured, and the book was made after the best style of the printer's
art, with gilt borders, gilt edges, and bound in silver of an embossed
bamboo pattern and encased in a silver box. It was then enclosed in a
red plush box,--red being the colour indicating happiness,--which was
in turn encased in a beautifully carved teak-wood box, and this was
enclosed in an ordinary box and taken by the English and American
ministers to the Foreign Office to be sent in to Her Majesty.

The next day the Emperor sent to the American Bible Society for copies
of the Old and New Testaments, such as were being sold to his people. A
few days thereafter a Chinese friend--a horticulturist and gardener who
went daily to the palace with flowers and vegetables--came to me in
confidence as though bearing an important secret, and said:

"Something of unusual importance is taking place in the palace."

"Indeed?" said I; "what makes you think so?"

"Heretofore when I have gone into the palace," said he, "the eunuchs
hav