), the following bit of gossip about the king Senen of Tse.

"The king," said he, "was sitting aloft in the hall, when
a man appeared, leading an ox past the lower part of it.
The king saw him, and asked, 'Where is the ox going?'

"The man replied, 'We are going to consecrate a bell with
its blood.'

"The king said, 'Let it go. I cannot bear its frightened
appearance as if it were an innocent person going to the
place of death.'

"The man answered, 'Shall we then omit the consecration
of the bell?'

"The king said, 'How can that be omitted? Change the ox
for a sheep.'"

As stated before, this is one of the few cases in which Chinese
superstition coincides with that of the West; for our own church
bells were once consecrated in very much the same manner, a
survival of that ancient universal custom of sacrifice. With
the exception of this resemblance, which, however, has nothing
to do with actual music, everything in Chinese art is exactly
the opposite of our western ideas on the subject.

The Chinese orchestra is composed of about sixteen different
types of percussion instruments and four kinds of wind and
stringed instruments, whereas in our European orchestras the
ratio is exactly reversed. Their orchestras are placed at
the back of the stage, ours in front of it. The human voice
is not even mentioned in their list of musical sounds (sound
of metal, baked clay, wood, skin, bamboo, etc)., whereas we
consider it the most nearly perfect instrument existing. This
strange perversity once caused much discussion in days when
we knew less of China than we do at present, as to whether
the Chinese organs of hearing were not entirely different from
those of western nations. We now know that this contradiction
runs through all their habits of life. With them white is the
colour indicative of mourning; the place of honour is on the
left hand; the seat of intellect is in the stomach; to take off
one's hat is considered an insolent gesture; the magnetic needle
of the Chinese compass is reckoned as pointing south, instead of
north; even up to the middle of the nineteenth century the chief
weapon in war was the bow and arrow, although they were long
before acquainted with gunpowder--and so on, _ad infinitum_.

We are aware that the drum is the most primitive instrument
known to man. If all our knowledge of the Chinese were included
in a simple list of their orchestral instruments, we should
recogni