uld go; yes;--but a mort of pernicious
lies would go with it. Well, well; one speaks of course in jest
(partly). But when all is said, China was not unfortunate in
having a strong giant of a man, a foreigner withal, at her head
during those crucial decades. Ts'in Shi Hwangti guarded China
through most of that perilous intermission between the cycles.
It was the good that he did that mostly lived after him.

In 210 he fell ill, took no precautions, and died,--in his
fiftieth year. A marvelous mausoleum was built for him: a
palace, with a mountain heaped on top, and the floor of it a map
of China, with the waters done in quicksilver. Whether his evil
deeds were interred with his bones, who can say?--certainly his
living wives were, and the thousands of living workmen who had
built the mausoleum. Ts'innish doings, not Chinese. In the
_Book of Odes,_ Confucius preserved a Ts'in ballad mourning over
men so buried alive with their dead king.

The strong hand lifted, rebellion broke out, and for awhile it
looked as if Chu Hia must sink into the beast again. His feeble
son got rid of Meng-tien, poisoned Li Ssu, offered the feeblest
resistance to the rebels, and then poisoned himself. After four
years of fighting,--what you might call "unpleasantness all
round,"--one Liu Pang achieved the throne. He had started life
as a beadle; joined Ts'in Shi Hwangti's army, and risen to be a
general; created himself after the emperor's death Prince of
Han; and now had the honor to inaugurate, as Emperor Kaotsu, the
greatest of the Chinese dynasties.

In the two-fifties strong barbarous Ts'in had swallowed unmanly
worn-out China, and for half a century had been digesting the
feast. Then--to mix my metaphors a little--China flopped up to
the surface again, pale, but smiling blandly. In the sunlight
she gathered strength and cohesion, and proceeded presently to
swallow Ts'in and everything else in sight; and emerged soon
young, strong, vigorous, and glowing-hearted to the conquest of
many worlds in the unknown. What was Ts'in, now is Shensi
Province, the very Heart of Han: the Shensi man today is the Son
of Han, _Ts'in_ Englished; but in Shensi, the old Ts'in, in
their tenderest moods, they call it _Han_ still,--the proudest
most patriotic name there is for it.

Not at once was the Golden Age of Han to dawn: half a
thirteen-decade cycle from the opening of the manvantara in
the two-forties had to pass first. Ts'in Shi H