gical silence. Yet
it is related that about the same time, as Hien was walking by the
side of a bamboo forest of stunted growth, he was astonished by the
maiden suddenly appearing before him from the direction of the royal
camp. She was incomparably radiant and had the appearance of being
exceptionally well satisfied with herself. Commanding him that he
should stand motionless with closed eyes, in order to ascertain what
the presiding deities would allot him, she bound a somewhat weighty
object to the end of his pig-tail, at the same time asking him in how
short a period he could commit about nineteen thousand lines of
atrociously ill-arranged verse to the tablets of his mind.

"Then do not suffer the rice to grow above your ankles," she
continued, when Hien had modestly replied that six days with good
omens should be sufficient, "but retiring to your innermost chamber
bar the door and digest this scroll as though it contained the last
expression of an eccentric and vastly rich relation," and with a laugh
more musical than the vibrating of a lute of the purest Yun-nan jade
in the Grotto of Ten Thousand Echoes she vanished.

It has been sympathetically remarked that no matter how painstakingly
a person may strive to lead Destiny along a carefully-prepared path
and towards a fit and thoroughly virtuous end there is never lacking
some inopportune creature to thrust his superfluous influence into an
opposing balance. This naturally suggests the intolerable Tsin Lung,
whose ghoulish tastes led him to seek the depths of that same glade on
the following day. Walking with downcast eyes, after his degraded
custom, he presently became aware of an object lying some distance
from his way. To those who have already fathomed the real character of
this repulsive person it will occasion no surprise to know that, urged
on by the insatiable curiosity that was deeply grafted on to his
avaricious nature, he turned aside to probe into a matter with which
he had no possible concern, and at length succeeded in drawing a
package from the thick bush in which it had been hastily concealed.
Finding that it contained twelve lengthy poems entitled "Concerning
Spring", he greedily thrust one in his sleeve, and upon his return,
with no other object than the prompting of an ill-regulated mind, he
spent all the time that remained before the contest in learning it
from end to end.

There have been many remarkable scenes enacted in the great
Examinat