on the English language to call
this kindly, gentle soul by the same title that we have been accustomed
to use in speaking of the woman who has just passed away."

My wife tells me that,--"A number of years ago I was called to see Mrs.
Chang Hsu who was suffering from a nervous breakdown due to worry and
sleeplessness. On inquiry I discovered that her two daughters had been
taken into the palace as concubines of the Emperor Kuang Hsu. Her
friends feared a mental breakdown, and begged me to do all I could for
her. She took me by the hand, pulled me down on the brick bed beside
her, and told me in a pathetic way how both of her daughters had been
taken from her in a single day.

"'But they have been taken into the palace,' I urged, to try to comfort
her, 'and I have heard that the Emperor is very fond of your eldest
daughter, and wanted to make her his empress.'

"'Quite right,' she replied, 'but what consolation is there in that?
They are only concubines, and once in the palace they are dead to me.
No matter what they suffer, I can never see them or offer them a word
of comfort. I am afraid of the court intrigues, and they are only
children and cannot understand the duplicity of court life--I fear for
them, I fear for them,' and she swayed back and forth on her brick bed.

"Time, however, the great healer with a little medicine and sympathy to
quiet her nerves, brought about a speedy recovery, though in the end
her fears proved all too true."

In 1897 the brother of this first concubine met Kang Yu-wei in the
south, and became one of his disciples. Upon his return to Peking,
knowing of the Emperor's desire for reform, and his affection for his
sister, he found means of communicating with her about the young
reformer.

At the time of the coup d'etat, and the imprisonment of the Emperor,
this first concubine was degraded and imprisoned on the ground of
having been the means of introducing Kang Yu-wei to the notice of the
Emperor, and thus interfering in state affairs. She continued in
solitary confinement from that time until the flight of the court in
1900 when in their haste to get away from the allies she was overlooked
and left in the palace. When she discovered that she was alone with the
eunuchs, fearing that she might become a victim to the foreign
soldiers, she took her life by jumping into a well. On the return of
the court in 1902, the Empress Dowager bestowed upon her posthumous
honours, in recognition o