he Books of the Three Emperors (Yao, Shun, and
Yu). Get these, practise the discipline they enjoin, and you
will attain the power of ascending to heaven." He found the
Pesung Mountain; and the stone house; and dug, and discovered
the books; which taught him how to fly, to leave his body at
will, and to hear all sounds the most distant. During a thousand
days he disciplined himself; a goddess came to him, and taught
him to walk among the stars; then he learned to cleave the seas
and the mountains, and command the thunder and the winds. He
fought the king of the demons, whose hosts fled before him
"leaving no trace of their departing footsteps." So great
slaughter he wrought in that battle that, we are told, "various
divinities came with eager haste to acknowledge their faults."
In nine years he gained the power of ascending to heaven. His
last days were spent on the Dragon-Tiger Mountain; where, at the
age of a hundred and twenty-three, he drank the elixir, and
soared skyward in broad daylight;--followed (I think it was he)
by all the poultry in his barnyard, immortalized by the drops
that fell from the cup as he drank. He left his books of magic,
and his magical sword and seal, to his descendants; but I think
the Dragon-Tiger Mountain did not come into their possession
until some centuries later.

I judge that the tales of the Taoist _Sennin_ or Adepts, if told
by some Chinese-enamored Lafcadio, would be about the best
collection of fairy-stories in the world; they reveal a
universe so deliciously nooked and crannied with bewildering
possibilities:--as indeed this our universe is;--only not all its
byways are profitable traveling. It is all very well to cry out
against superstition; but we are only half-men in the West: we
have lost the faculty of wonder and the companionship of
extrahuman things. We walk our narrow path to nowhere safely
trussed up in our personal selves: or we not so much walk at
all, as lie still, chrysalissed in them:--it may be just as well,
since for lack of the quality of balance, we are about as capable
of walking at ease and dignity as is a jellyfish of doing Blondin
on the tight-rope. China, in her pralaya and dearth of souls,
may have fallen into the perils of her larger freedom, and some
superstition rightly to be called degrading: in our Middle Ages,
when we were in pralaya, we were superstitious enough; and being
unbalanced, fell into other evils too such as China never kne