son who allowed mosquitoes to feed upon him, and did
not drive them away lest they should go and annoy his parents; another
son who wept so passionately because he could procure no bamboo shoots
for his mother that the gods were touched, and up out of the ground
came some shoots which he gathered and carried home; another who when
carrying buckets of water would slip and fall on purpose, in order to
make his parents laugh; and so on. No wonder that Confucius found filial
piety beyond his powers of definition.

Now for a genuine example. There is a very wonderful novel in which a
very affecting love-story is worked out to a terribly tragic conclusion.
The heroine, a beautiful and fascinating girl, finally dies of
consumption, and the hero, a wayward but none the less fascinating
youth, enters the Buddhist priesthood. A lady, the mother of a clever
young official, was so distressed by the pathos of the tale that she
became quite ill, and doctors prescribed medicines in vain. At length,
when things were becoming serious, the son set to work and composed a
sequel to this novel, in which he resuscitated the heroine and made
the lovers happy by marriage; and in a short time he had the intense
satisfaction of seeing his mother restored to health.

Other forms of filial piety, which bear no relation whatever to the
fanciful fables given above, are commonly practised by all classes. In
consequence of the serious or prolonged illness of parents, it is very
usual for sons and daughters to repair to the municipal temple and pray
that a certain number of years may be cut off their own span of life and
added to that of the sick parents in question.

Let us now pause to take stock of some of the results which have accrued
from the operation and influence of Confucianism during such a long
period, and over such swarming myriads of the human race. It is
a commonplace in the present day to assert that the Chinese are
hardworking, thrifty, and sober--the last-mentioned, by the way, in a
land where drunkenness is not regarded as a crime. Shallow observers
of the globe-trotter type, who have had their pockets picked by
professional thieves in Hong-Kong, and even resident observers who have
not much cultivated their powers of observation and comparison, will
assert that honesty is a virtue denied to the Chinese; but those who
have lived long in China and have more seriously devoted themselves to
discover the truth, may one and all be said