on the tenth morning to take forth the
porcelain marvel, even the bones of Pu had ceased to be; but lo! the
Vase lived as they looked upon it: seeming to be flesh moved by the
utterance of a Word, creeping to the titillation of a Thought. And
whenever tapped by the finger it uttered a voice and a name,--the voice
of its maker, the name of its creator: PU.

* * * * *

And the son of Heaven, hearing of these things, and viewing the miracle
of the vase, said unto those about him: "Verily, the Impossible hath
been wrought by the strength of faith, by the force of obedience! Yet
never was it our desire that so cruel a sacrifice should have been; we
sought only to know whether the skill of the matchless artificer came
from the Divinities or from the Demons,--from heaven or from hell. Now,
indeed, we discern that Pu hath taken his place among the gods." And the
Emperor mourned exceedingly for his faithful servant. But he ordained
that godlike honors should be paid unto the spirit of the marvellous
artist, and that his memory should be revered forevermore, and that
fair statues of him should be set up in all the cities of the Celestial
Empire, and above all the toiling of the potteries, that the multitude
of workers might unceasingly call upon his name and invoke his
benediction upon their labors.

[Illustration: Chinese calligraphy]

NOTES

"_The Soul of the Great Bell._"--The story of Ko-Ngai is one of the
collection entitled _Pe-Hiao-Tou-Choue_, or "A Hundred Examples of
Filial Piety." It is very simply told by the Chinese narrator. The
scholarly French consul, P. Dabry de Thiersant, translated and published
in 1877 a portion of the book, including the legend of the Bell. His
translation is enriched with a number of Chinese drawings; and there is
a quaint little picture of Ko-Ngai leaping into the molten metal.

"_The Story of Ming-Y._"--The singular phantom-tale upon which my work
is based forms the thirty-fourth story of the famous collection
_Kin-Kou-Ki-Koan_, and was first translated under the title, "La
Bacheliere du Pays de Chu," by the learned Gustave Schlegel, as an
introduction to his publication (accompanied by a French version) of
the curious and obscene _Mai-yu-lang-tou-tchen-hoa-kouei_ (Leyden,
1877), which itself forms the seventh recital of the same work.
Schlegel, Julien, Gardner, Birch, D'Entrecolles, Remusat, Pavie,
Olyphant, Grisebach, Hervey-Saint-Denys, and o