elf with that explanation. He made a verse about
it as he trudged home through the woods, and went crooning:

At dawn in the hollow, beside the stream,
I hid the deer I killed in the dream;
At eve I sought for it far and near;
And found 'twas a dream that I killed the deer.

He passed the cottage of Yen the woodman--Yen we may call him,
though Liehtse calls him nothing.--who heard the song, and
pondered. "One might as well take a look at the place," thought
he; it seemed to him it might be such and such a hollow, by such
and such a stream. Thither he went, and found the pile of
brushwood; It looked to him a likely place enough to hide a deer
under. He made search, and there the carcass was.

He took it home and explained the matter to his wife. "Once upon
a time," said he, "a fuel-gatherer dreamed he had killed a deer
and forgotten where he had hidden it. Now I have got the deer,
and here it is; so his dream came true, in a way."--"Rubbish!"
she answered. "It was you must have dreamed the fuel-gatherer
and his dreim. You must have killed the deer yourself, since you
have it there; but where is your fuel-gatherer?"

That night Li dreamed again; and in his dream saw Yen fetch the
deer from its hiding-place and bring it home. So in the morning
he went to Yen's house and there, sure enough, the deer was.
They argued the matter out, but to no purpose. Then they took it
before the magistrate, who gave judgment as follows:

"The plaintiff began with a real deer and an alleged dream; and
now comes forward with a real dream and an alleged deer. The
defendant has the deer the plaintiff dreamed, and wants to keep
it. According to his wife, however, the plaintiff and the deer
are both but figments of the defendant's dream. Meanwhile, there
is the deer; which you had better divide between you."

The case was reported to the Prince of Cheng, whose opinion was
that the magistrate had dreamed the whole story, himself. But
his Prime Minister said: "If you want to distinguish between
dream and waking, you would have to go back to the Yellow Emperor
or Confucius. As both are dead, you had better uphold the
magistrate's decision." *

------
* The tale is told both in Dr. Lionel Giles's translation
mentioned above, and also, with verbal differences, in Dr. H. A.
Giles's work on _Chinese Literature._ The present telling
follows now one, now the other version, now goes its own way;--
and pleads