her baby she shut herself up in a little hut outside of the city,
seeing no one, and giving her whole time to the care of the child and her
efforts to find truth. The members of her family, which is one of the
wealthiest and most aristocratic in Kiukiang, were greatly pleased with
what they considered an eminently virtuous resolve for a young widow to
make, and applied to the Emperor for his approval of the course she had
decided to follow. This being heartily given, they built a very comfortable
home for her on the outskirts of Kiukiang. The building was christened
Purity Hall, and over its gateway were placed large placards announcing the
imperial sanction of the life which the young widow had chosen for herself
and her child.

Here the little girl grew to womanhood, knowing no companionship except
that of her mother and her teachers. Her mother employed the best possible
Chinese teachers for her, and she early learned to read the books of the
three religions of China, that she might join her mother in her pursuit of
truth. She seldom left the house, and no one but her teachers ever entered
it, but day after day she pored over the books on Taoism, Buddhism, and
Confucianism until she had read them all. She, too, became a Taoist nun,
but continued in the worship and study of Buddhism and Confucianism also,
determined to find the _true_ religion.

She even surpassed her mother in the ardour of her search for truth, for
she spent twelve entire years, in periods of three years each, in one room
of the house, living in the most absolute seclusion, not seeing her
mother, speaking to no one, and hearing no voice, for three years at a
time. After such a vigil she came out into the rest of the house for a
year, then went back for another three years of solitude. In one corner of
this room were the shrine and the altar before which Yu Kuliang knelt hour
after hour during the years of her long vigil, and the idols, large and
small, of wood and stone, which were her only companions. She always kept
three sticks of incense burning before the shrine, one for each religion,
that she might be sure not to make a mistake. In the ardour of her devotion
she even made offerings of pieces of her own flesh to the idols. Her whole
body, even her face, was covered with the ugly round scars caused by this
self-mutilation.

When Yu Kuliang was a woman of thirty-two she learned that the Stones were
her cousins, and of her own accord went to ca