estors in very
truth our souls? Is not every action the work of the dead who dwell
within us? Have not our impulses and our tendencies, our capacities
and our weaknesses, our heroisms and our fears, been created by
those vanished myriads from whom we received that all-mysterious
gift of life? Should we think of that thing which is in each of us and
which we call 'I' should it be 'I' or 'they'? What is our pride or shame
but the pride or shame of the unseen in that which they have made?
And what is our conscience but the inherited sum of countless dead
experiences with all things good and evil?"

"In this worship that we give the dead they are made divine. And the
thought of this tender reverence will temper with consolation the
melancholy that comes with age to all of us. Never in our China are
the dead too quickly forgotten; by simple faith they are still thought to
dwell among their beloved, and their place within the home remains
holy. When we pass to the land of shadows we know that loving lips
will nightly murmur our names before the family shrine, that our faithful
ones will beseech us in their pain and bless us in their joy. We will
not be left alone upon the hillsides, but loving hands will place before
our tablet the fruits and flowers and dainty food that we were wont to
like, and will pour for us the fragrant cups of tea or amber rice-wine."

"Strange changes are coming upon this land, old customs are
vanishing, old beliefs are weakening, the thoughts of to-day will not be
the thoughts of to-morrow; but of all this we will know nothing. We
dream that for us as for our mothers the little lamp will burn on
through the generations; we see in fancy the yet unborn, the children
of our children's children, bowing their tiny heads and making the filial
obeisance before the tablets that bear our family name."

This is our comfort, we who feel that "this world is not a place of rest,
but where we may now take our little ease, until the landlord whom we
never see, gives our apartment to another guest."

As I said to thee, it is the women who are the preservers of the family
worship and who are trying hard to cling to old loved customs.
Perhaps it is because we suffer from lack of facility in adapting
ourselves to new conditions. We are as fixed as the star in its orbit.
Not so much the men of China but we women of the inner courtyards
seem to our younger generation to stand an immovable mountain in
the pathway of t