g a hair's-breadth of the mountains,
much less the whole vast mass of rock and soil." With a sigh the
Simpleton of the North Mountain answered:--"Surely it is you who
are narrow-minded and unreasonable. You are not to be compared
with the widow's son, despite his puny strength. Though I myself
must die, I shall leave my son behind me, and he his son. My
grandson will beget sons in his turn, and those sons also will
have sons and grandsons. With all this posterity my line will
not die out; while on the other hand the mountains will receive
no increment or addition. Why then should I despair of leveling
them to the ground at last?"--The Wise Old Man of the River-bend
had nothing to say in reply.

Chinese! Chinese!--From whatever angle you look at it, it smacks
of the nation that saw Babylon fall, and Rome, and may yet--

But look now, at what happened. There was something about the
project and character of the Simpleton of the North Mountain,
that attracted the attention of the Serpent-Brandishing deities.
They reported the matter to Almighty God; who was interested;
and perhaps was less patient than the simpleton.--I do not quite
know who this person translated 'Almighty God' may be; I think
he figures in the Taoist hierarchy somewhere below Laotse and the
other Adepts. At any rate he was in a position to order the two
sons of K'ua O--and I do not know who K'ua O and his sons were--
to expedite matters. So the one of them took up T'ai-hsing, and
the other Wu-wang, and transported them to the positions where
they remain to this day to prove the truth of Liehtse's story.
Further proof:--the region between Ts'i in the north and Han in
the south--that is to say, northern Homan--is still and has been
ever since, an unbroken plain.

And perhaps, behind this naive Chinesity, lie grand enunciations
of occult law. . . .

I will end with what is probably Liehtse's most famous story--
and, from a purely literary standpoint, his best. It is worthy
of Chwangtse himself; and I tell it less for its philosophy than
for its fun.

One morning a fuel-gatherer--we may call him Li for convenience,
though Liehtse leaves him nameless--killed a deer in the forest;
and to keep the carcass safe till he went home in the evening,
hid it under a pile of brushwood. His work during the day took
him far and when he looked for the deer again, he could not find
it. "I must have dreamed the whole thing," he said;--and
satisfied hims