~The Museum too is a delight to the eye and a wonder to the inner man. Chinese through and through patterned from nowhere unless it be an odd line caught here and there from Mongolia, Tibet or distant India. Lovers of art could spend years here. I remember one picture specially of Buddha's heaven. Up the heights it went with every expression of spiritual refinement and colour, beautiful beyond words. Who would not look straight through for such a matchless paradise? It even outbid Sir Henry Irving's Dante that I once saw at Drury Lane.
The porcelains, too, were most interesting. A group from thie days of Chienlung, modelled after the Foreigner gave a touch of plaisanterie to the otherwise serious collection. Here they are, huge of nose and heavy of foot, delightfully ugly, telling what the great emperor thought of us in those halcyon days. His opinion accords with that of a Japanese friend who once said to me, "When you Foreigners are children you are very beautiful but when you grow up you, you—"' "Yes, yes," I said, "I quite understand."
The Winter Palace, the Summer Palace tell of the eerie doings of the Empress Dowager where tragedy and comedy lived and flourished under her wing. The unrequited spirit of the dead emperor hovers over the place, the screaming soul of the young wife dropped into the well, the death rattle of the old Buddha Herself as she grinningly passed on her way.
We lunched in the stone boat.by the lake which boat is a fair example of China's colossal "'squeeze."' Nevertheless, in spite of it how wonderful is thb Summer Palace. From its gay top we saw all the world as queens and em-perers used to see it go by: donkey boys, camels, motor-cars, wheelbarrows, up-to-date young Chinamen fresh from Columbia, ancient priests unwashed since the death of the Dalai Lama.
It had long been a matter of interest to the writer to "know the nature of the pool that feeds the Palace as well as the. Upper and Lower Sea. By a ticket at the gate and a walk through a ady avenue we came to its fountain head. It drops neither from the Milky Way nor from the star clusters above the Kwun-lin Mountains of Tibet but simply wells forth in unbounded measure from the heart of Mother Eartht The Jade Fountain is indeed among the wonders of Peking. A tall pagoda, very Chinese in appearance, stands on a hill overlooking its crystal depths.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.