l understand him better for remembering
the kind of heredity that lay behind him: some seventy
generations of nobility, all historic. Only one royal house in
the world now is as old as his was then: that of Japan.

Some generations before, the K'ung family had lost their duchy of
Sung and emigrated to Lu; where, in the early part of the sixth
century, its head, this Shuhliang Heih, had made a great name for
himself as a soldier. He was now a widower, and seventy years
old; and saw himself compelled to make a second marriage, or the
seventy illustrious generations of his ancestors would be
deprived of a posterity to offer them sacrifices. So he
approached a gentlman of the Yen family, who had three eligible
daughters. To these Yen put the case, leaving to them to decide
which should marry K'ung.--"Though old and austere," said he,
"he is of the high descent, and you need have no fear of him."
Chingtsai, the youngest, answered that it was for their father to
choose.--"Then you shall marry him," said Yen. She did; and
when her son was to be born, she was warned in a dream to make
pilgrimage to a cave on Mount Ne. There the spirits of the
mountain attended; there were signs and portents in the heavens
at the nativity. The _k'e-lin,_ a beast out of the mythologies,
appeared to her; and she tied a white ribbon about its single
horn. It is a creature that appears only when things of splendid
import are to happen.

Three years after, the father died, leaving his family on the
borders of poverty. At six, Ch'iu, the child, a boy of serious
earnest demeanor, was teaching his companions to play at
arranging, according to the rites, toy sacrificial vessels on a
toy altar. Beyond this, and that they were poor, and that he
doted on his mother--who would have deserved it,--we know little
of his boyhood. "At fifteen," he tells us himself, "his mind
was bent on learning." Nothing in the way of studies, seems to
have come amiss to him; of history, and ritual, and poetry, he
came to know all that was to be known. He loved music, theory
and practice; held it to be sacred: "not merely one of the
refinements of life, but a part of life itself." It is as well
to remember this; and that often, in after life, he turned
dangerous situations by breaking into song; and that his lute
was his constant companion. He used to say that a proper study
of poetry--he was not himself a poet, though he compiled a great
anthology of fol