an who made him has forgotten him.

Blue is his graven face, and silver-blue his hands. His
eyebrows and his silken beard are scarlet as the
hope that built him.
The yellow dragon on his rotting robes still rears itself
majestically, but thread by thread time eats its
scales away,
And man who made him has forgotten him.

For incense now he breathes the homely smell of rice
and tea, stored in his anteroom;
For priests the busy spiders hang festoons between his
fingers, and nest them in his yellow nails.
And darkness broods upon him.
The veil that hid the awful face of godhead from the
too impetuous gaze of worshippers serves in decay
to hide from deity the living face of man,
So god no longer sees his maker.

Let us drop the curtain and be gone!
I am old too, here in eternity.

Pa-tze-kiao

The Bridge

The Bridge of the Eight Scholars spans the canal narrowly.
On the gray stone of its arch are carvings in low relief,
and the curve of its span is pleasing to the eye.
No one knows how old is the Bridge of the Eight
Scholars.

In our house-boat we pass under it. The boatman
with the rat-like face twists the long broken-backed
oar, churning the yellow water, and we creep forward
steadily.
On the bridge the village is assembled. Foreign devils
are a rarity.
The gold-brown faces are not unfriendly, merely curious.
They peer in rows over the rail with grunts
of nasal interest.
Tentatively, experimentally, as we pass they spit down
upon us. Not that they wish us ill, but it can be
done, and the temptation is too great.

We retire into the house-boat.
The roof scrapes as we pass under the span of the
Bridge of the Eight Scholars.

Pa-tze-kiao

The Shop

(The articles sold here are to be burned at funerals for
the use of the dead in the spirit world.)

The master of the shop is a pious man, in good odor
with the priests.
He is old and honorable and his white moustache
droops below his chin.
Mencius, I think, looked so.

The shop behind him is a mimic world, a world
of pieties and shams--the valley of remembrance--the
dwelling place of the unquiet dead.
Here on his shelves are ranged the splendor and the
panoply of life, silk in smooth gleaming rolls, silver
in ingots, carving and embroidery and jade, a
scarlet bearer-chair, a pipe for opium....
Whatever life has need of, it is here,
And