added another, "and remember that the Chinese revere their
ancestors and their sages and their shrines more than we ever dream of
doing. Any grave is a sacred spot to them, so much so that railroads
have to run their trunk lines for miles in a detour to avoid graves.
These Chinese are idealists of the first water. They live in the past,
and they dream of the future."

"When you get these facts into your American heads," added a third
member of the party, not without some bitterness, "then you will begin
to know that the Chinese do not estimate the loss of Shantung in terms
of mineral wealth."

At Chufu, the resting-place of Confucius, there is also the spot of his
birth, and this too is most sacred to the Chinese nation. We visited
both places. I think that I never before quite realized just what the
loss of Shantung meant to these Chinese until that day, unless it was
the next day, when we climbed the sacred mountain Taishan, which is
also in Shantung.

"It is the oldest worshiping-place in the world," said the historian of
the party. "There is no other spot on earth where continuous worship has
gone on so long. Here for more than twenty centuries before Christ was
born men and women were worshiping. Emperors from the oldest history of
China down to the present time have all visited this mountain to
worship. Confucius himself climbed the more than six thousand steps to
worship here."

"Yes," said another missionary historian, "and this mountain is referred
to twelve separate times in the Chinese classics, and great pilgrimages
were made here as long ago as two centuries before Christ."

That day we climbed the mountain up more than six thousand stone steps,
which are in perfect condition and which were engineered thousands of
years ago by early worshipers.

The only climb with which I can compare that of Mt. Taishan is that of
Mt. Tamalpais overlooking San Francisco. The climb is about equal to
that. The mountain itself is about a mile in height, and the climb is a
hard one to those who are unaccustomed to mountain-climbing, and yet
thousands upon thousands climb it every year after pilgrimages from all
over China.

We climbed to the top of Taishan, and saw the "No-Character Stone"
erected by Emperor Chin, he who tried to drive learning out of China
hundreds of years ago. We saw the spot on which Confucius stood, and
glimpsed the Pacific Ocean, ninety miles away, on a clear day. It was a
hard climb; but, when