kind by the power of a
holy vow, the virtue of a pious atonement.

[Illustration: Chinese calligraphy]

The Tale of the Porcelain-God

_It is written in the _FONG-HO-CHIN-TCH'OUEN_, that whenever the
artist Thsang-Kong was in doubt, he would look into the fire of the
great oven in which his vases were baking, and question the
Guardian-Spirit dwelling in the flame. And the Spirit of the
Oven-fires so aided him with his counsels, that the porcelains made
by Thsang-Kong were indeed finer and lovelier to look upon than all
other porcelains. And they were baked in the years of
Khang-hi,--sacredly called Jin Houang-ti._

THE TALE OF THE PORCELAIN-GOD

Who first of men discovered the secret of the _Kao-ling_, of the
_Pe-tun-tse_,--the bones and the flesh, the skeleton and the skin, of
the beauteous Vase? Who first discovered the virtue of the curd-white
clay? Who first prepared the ice-pure bricks of _tun_: the
gathered-hoariness of mountains that have died for age; blanched dust of
the rocky bones and the stony flesh of sun-seeking Giants that have
ceased to be? Unto whom was it first given to discover the divine art of
porcelain?

Unto Pu, once a man, now a god, before whose snowy statues bow the
myriad populations enrolled in the guilds of the potteries. But the
place of his birth we know not; perhaps the tradition of it may have
been effaced from remembrance by that awful war which in our own day
consumed the lives of twenty millions of the Black-haired Race, and
obliterated from the face of the world even the wonderful City of
Porcelain itself,--the City of King-te-chin, that of old shone like a
jewel of fire in the blue mountain-girdle of Feou-liang.

Before his time indeed the Spirit of the Furnace had being; had issued
from the Infinite Vitality; had become manifest as an emanation of the
Supreme Tao. For Hoang-ti, nearly five thousand years ago, taught men to
make good vessels of baked clay; and in his time all potters had learned
to know the God of Oven-fires, and turned their wheels to the murmuring
of prayer. But Hoang-ti had been gathered unto his fathers for thrice
ten hundred years before that man was born destined by the Master of
Heaven to become the Porcelain-God.

And his divine ghost, ever hovering above the smoking and the toiling of
the potteries, still gives power to the thought of the shaper, grace to
the genius of the designer, luminosit