coming from the east gate if he had
seen him there.--"Well," said the man, "there is a man there with
a forehead like Yao, a neck like Kao Yao, his shoulders on a
level with those of Tse-ch'an, but wanting below the waist three
inches of the height of Yu;--and altogether having the forsaken
appearance of a stray dog." Tse Kung recognised the description
and hurried off to meet the Master, to whom he reported it
_verbatim._ Confucius was hugely delighted. "A stray dog!" said
he; "fine! fine!" Unluckily, no contemporary photographs of Yao
and Yu and the others have come down; so the description is not
as enlightening now as it may have been then.

"Tse Kung," we read, "would compare one man with another." The
Master said:--"What talents Tse has! Now I have no time for
such things!"

I keep on hearing in his words accents that sound familiar.

When he was at Loyang--Honanfu--one of the things that struck him
most was a bronze statue in the Temple of the Imperial Ancestors,
with a triple, clasp on its mouth. One does not wonder. A Great
Soul from the God World, he kept his eyes resolutely on the world
of men; as if he remembered, nothing of the splendor, and
nothing foresaw. . . . Indeed, I cannot tell; one would give
much to know what really passed between him and Laotse. If you
say that no word of his lightens, for you that 'dusk within the
Holy of holies',--at least he gives you the keys, and leaves you
to find and open the 'Holy of holies' for yourself if you can.
There are lost chapters, that went at the Burning of the Books;
and an old-fashioned Chinaman would often tell you of any Western
idea or invention his countrymen may not have known, that you
should have found all in the lost chapters of Confucius. It may
be;--and that you should have found there better things, too,
than Western ideas and inventions. There is a passage in the
_Analects_ that tells how the disciples thought he was 'keeping
back from them some part of his doctrine: "No, no," he
answered; "if I should not give it all to you, to whom should I
give it?" Distinctly, then, this suggests that there was an
esotericism, a side not made public; and there is no reason to
suppose that it has been made public since. But it is recorded
that he would lift no veils from the Other-worlds. "If you do
not understand life," said he, "how can you understand death?"

Well; we who are stranded here, each on his desert island of
selfhood, thrust ou