impress those with whom he was dealing with his
undoubted knowledge of the subject, he finally succeeded in making a
very advantageous arrangement by which he was to pay one-half of the
number of taels expended in producing the work, and to receive in return
all the profits which should result from the undertaking. Those who
were concerned in the matter were so engagingly impressed with the
incomparable literary merit displayed in the production that they
counselled a great number of copies being made ready in order, as they
said, that this person should not lose by there being any delay
when once the accomplishment became the one topic of conversation in
tea-houses and yamens. From this cause it came about that the matter of
taels to be expended was much greater than had been anticipated at the
beginning, so that when the day arrived on which the volumes were to
be sent forth this person found that almost his last piece of money had
disappeared.

"Alas! how small a share has a person in the work of controlling his own
destiny. Had only the necessarily penurious and now almost degraded Kai
Lung been born a brief span before the great writer Lo Kuan Chang, his
name would have been received with every mark of esteem from one end of
the Empire to the other, while taels and honourable decorations would
have been showered upon him. For the truth, which could no longer be
concealed, revealed the fact that this inopportune individual possessed
a mind framed in such a manner that his thoughts had already been the
thoughts of the inspired Lo Kuan, who, as this person would not be so
presumptuous as to inform this ornamental and well-informed gathering,
was the most ingenious and versatile-minded composer of written words
that this Empire--and therefore the entire world--has seen, as, indeed,
his honourable title of 'The Many-hued Mandarin Duck of the Yang-tse'
plainly indicates.

"Although this self-opinionated person had frequently been greatly
surprised himself during the writing of his long work by the brilliance
and manysidedness of the thoughts and metaphors which arose in his mind
without conscious effort, it was not until the appearance of the printed
leaves which make a custom of warning persons against being persuaded
into buying certain books that he definitely understood how all these
things had been fully expressed many dynasties ago by the all-knowing
Lo Kuan Chang, and formed, indeed, the great national standard