veness of the inlaid boxes, and the matter should be engaged
upon without delay. In the meantime, however, not to waste the immediate
services of so discriminating and persevering a servant, he would
entrust Sen with a mission of exceptional importance, which would
certainly tend greatly to his remunerative benefit. In the district
of Yun, in the north-western part of the Province, said the crafty
and treacherous King-y-Yang, a particular kind of insect was greatly
esteemed on account of the beneficent influence which it exercised over
the rice plants, causing them to mature earlier, and to attain a greater
size than ever happened in its absence. In recent years this creature
had rarely been seen in the neighbourhood of Yun, and, in consequence,
the earth-tillers throughout that country had been brought into a most
disconcerting state of poverty, and would, inevitably, be prepared to
exchange whatever they still possessed for even a few of the insects, in
order that they might liberate them to increase, and so entirely reverse
the objectionable state of things. Speaking in this manner, King-y-Yang
entrusted to Sen a carefully prepared box containing a score of the
insects, obtained at a great cost from a country beyond the Bitter
Water, and after giving him further directions concerning the journey,
and enjoining the utmost secrecy about the valuable contents of the box,
he sent him forth.

"The discreet and sagacious will already have understood the nature of
King-y-Yang's intolerable artifice; but, for the benefit of the amiable
and unsuspecting, it is necessary to make it clear that the words which
he had spoken bore no sort of resemblance to affairs as they really
existed. The district around Yun was indeed involved in a most
unprepossessing destitution, but this had been caused, not by the
absence of any rare and auspicious insect, but by the presence of vast
hordes of locusts, which had overwhelmed and devoured the entire face
the country. It so chanced that among the recently constructed devices
at 'The Pure Gilt Dragon of Exceptional Symmetry' were a number of
elegant representations of rice fields and fruit gardens so skilfully
fashioned that they deceived even the creatures, and attracted, among
other living things, all the locusts in Hankow into that place of
commerce. It was a number of these insects that King-y-Yang vindictively
placed in the box which he instructed Sen to carry to Yun, well knowing
that th