If the following savours of the style of those who pretend to have the only authentic insight into things Chinese, and who can ex-ress. themselves only in journals purporting to inform the world of Cathay's "ancient civilization and culture, we cannot help it. We have been reading some "free" translations of Chinese poetry. What a thing freedom is, to be sure! No wonder Madame Roland, on her way to the guillotine, was moved to remark, "Ah, Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy However, to get on with our story. It has to do with the civilization and culture aforesaid, or, rather, with a phase of these. We forbear to print the Chinese characters in parenthesis after each classic allusion, for two reasons. The first is that it's too much bother seeing that the compositor as them right. 'The second, i'r dollars to doughnuts that the reader' wouldn't understand them any more than we, The hero of our story is one Gi Tso-lean, 'The nearest Englis equivalent for this name is "pet He dwelt, not in a remote village in the distant interior where Blah, the Mystic Mountain rears its altitude for the better scrutiny of the cock-eyed gods, and where in plum-blossom time' the plums blossom while languorous,—almond-eyed the up to dry after the annual immersion in the turquoise—Gool-gool River, but right here in Shanghai.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.