, and a number of other things which,
as we read of them, sound just like superstitious nonsense.
There are old Chinese drawings of pterodactyls, and suchlike
unchancey antediluvian wild fowl. _Argal,_ (you would say) the
Chinese knew of these once; although Ptero and his friends have
been extinct quite a few million years, one supposes. Or was it
superstition again? Then why was it not superstition in
Professor So-and-so, who found the bones and reconstructed the
beastie for holiday crowds to gaze upon at the Crystal Palace
or the Metropolitan Museum? Knowledge does die away into
reminiscence, and then into oblivion; and the chances are that
Liehtse's time retained reminiscences which have since become
oblivion-hidden;--then rediscovered in the West.--But I tell the
tale also for a certain divergence marked in it, between Taoist
and Confucian thought. Laotse would have chuckled over it, who
brooded much on 'self-emptiness' as the first step towards
illumination. Confucius would have allowed it; but it would not
have occurred to him, unsuggested.

Now here is something still further from Confucianism; something
prophetic of later Taoist developments, though it still contains
Laotse's thought, and--be it said--deep wisdom.

Fan Tsu Hua was a bully and a charlatan, who by his trickery
had won such hold over the king of Tsin that anyone he might
recommend was surely advanced to office, and anyone he cried down
would lose his all. So it was said he had magic to make the rich
poor and the poor rich. He had many disciples, who were the
terror of the peaceably disposed.

One day they saw an old weak man approaching, 'with weather-beaten
face and clothes of no particular cut.' A chance for sport
not to be neglected, they thought; and began to hustle him
about in their usual fashion, 'slapping him on the back, and what
not.' But he--Shang Ch'iu K'ai was his name--seemed only full of
joy and serenity, and heeded nothing. Growing tired of their fun
at last, they would make an end of it; and led him to the top of
a high cliff. "Whoever dares throw himself over," said one of
them, "will find a hundred ounces of silver," which certainly he
had not had with him at the top, and none of them had put there.

It was a wonder; and still more a wonder his being unhurt; but
you can make chance account for most things, and they meant to
get rid of him. So they brought him to the banks of the river,
saying: "A pearl of gr