ted
leaves who would encourage any project connected with its issue.'

"'But the importance of such a fact as that which would clearly show the
hitherto venerated Lo Kuan Chang to be a person who passed off as his
own the work of an earlier one!' cried this person in despair, well
knowing that the deliberately expressed opinion of the one before him
was a matter that would rule all others. 'Consider the interest of the
discovery.'

"'The interest would not demand more than a few lines in the ordinary
printed leaves,' replied the other calmly. 'Indeed, in a manner of
speaking, it is entirely a detail of no consequence whether or not the
sublime Lo Kuan ever existed. In reality his very commonplace name may
have been simply Lung; his inspired work may have been written a score
of dynasties before him by some other person, or they may have been
composed by the enlightened Emperor of the period, who desired to
conceal the fact, yet these matters would not for a moment engage the
interest of any ordinary passer-by. Lo Kuan Chang is not a person in the
ordinary expression; he is an embodiment of a distinguished and utterly
unassailable national institution. The Heaven-sent works with which
he is, by general consent, connected form the necessary unchangeable
standard of literary excellence, and remain for ever above rivalry and
above mistrust. For this reason the matter is plainly one which does not
interest this person.'

"In the course of a not uneventful existence this self-deprecatory
person has suffered many reverses and disappointments. During his youth
the high-minded Empress on one occasion stopped and openly complimented
him on the dignified outline presented by his body in profile, and when
he was relying upon this incident to secure him a very remunerative
public office, a jealous and powerful Mandarin substituted a somewhat
similar, though really very much inferior, person for him at the
interview which the Empress had commanded. Frequently in matters of
commerce which have appeared to promise very satisfactorily at the
beginning this person has been induced to entrust sums of money to
others, when he had hoped from the indications and the manner of
speaking that the exact contrary would be the case; and in one
instance he was released at a vast price from the torture dungeon in
Canton--where he had been thrown by the subtle and unconscientious
plots of one who could not relate stories in so accurate and unvaryi