shui-mang
    devils, and only the priest knows what beside.
A man may at any moment be bewitched, so that his
    silk-worms die and his children go blind and he
    gets the devil-sickness.
So living is difficult.
But Heaven has providentially decreed that these evil
    spirits can travel only in a straight line. Around
    a corner their power evaporates.
So my neighbor has built a wall that runs before his
    door. Windows of course he has none.
He cannot see his vegetable garden, and his toilet pots,
    and the dirty canal.
But he is quite safe!

Wusih

The Most-Sacred Mountain

Space, and the twelve clean winds of heaven,
And this sharp exultation, like a cry, after the slow
    six thousand steps of climbing!
This is Tai Shan, the beautiful, the most holy.

Below my feet the foot-hills nestle, brown with flecks
    of green; and lower down the flat brown plain, the
    floor of earth, stretches away to blue infinity.
Beside me in this airy space the temple roofs cut their
    slow curves against the sky,
And one black bird circles above the void.

Space, and the twelve clean winds are here; And with them broods eternity—a swift, white peace, a presence manifest. The rhythm ceases here. Time has no place. This is the end that has no end.

Here when Confucius came, a half a thousand years
    before the Nazarene, he stepped, with me, thus
    into timelessness.
The stone beside us waxes old, the carven stone that
    says: On this spot once Confucius stood and
    felt the smallness of the world below.

The stone grows old.
Eternity
Is not for stones.

But I shall go down from this airy space, this swift white peace, this stinging exultation; And time will close about me, and my soul stir to the rhythm of the daily round. Yet, having known, life will not press so close, and always I shall feel time ravel thin about me; For once I stood In the white windy presence of eternity.

Tai Shan

The Dandy

He swaggers in green silk and his two coats are lined with fur. Above his velvet shoes his trim, bound ankles twinkle pleasantly. His nails are of the longest. Quite the glass of fashion is Mr. Chu! In one slim hand—the ultimate punctilio—dangles a bamboo cage, wherein a small brown bird sits with a face of perpetual surprise. Mr. Chu smiles the benevolent smile of one who satisfies both fashion and a tender heart. Does not a bird need an airing?

Wusih

New China: The Iron Works

The furnaces, the great steel furnaces, tremble and
    glow; gigantic machinery clanks, and in living
    iridescent streams the white-hot slag pours out.
This is to-morrow set in yesterday, the west imbedded
    in the east, a graft but not a growth.

And you who walk beside me, picking your familiar way
    between the dynamos, the cars, the piles of rails—
    you too are of to-morrow, grafted with an alien
    energy.
You wear the costume of the west, you speak my
    tongue as one who knows; you talk casually of
    Sheffield, Pittsburgh, Essen….
You touch on Socialism, walk-outs, and the industrial
    population of the British Isles.
Almost you might be one of us.

And then I ask: "How much do those poor coolies earn a day, who take the place of carts?" You shrug and smile. "Eighteen coppers. Something less than eight cents in your money. They are not badly paid. They do not die."

Again I ask: "And is it true that you've a Yâmen, a police judge, all your own?" Another shrug and smile. "Yes, he attends to all small cases of disorder. For larger crimes we pass the offender over to the city courts."

* * * * *

"Conditions" you explain as we sit later with a cup
    of tea, "conditions here are difficult."
Your figure has grown lax, your voice a little weary.
    You are fighting, I can see, upheld by that strange
    graft of western energy.
Yet odds are heavy, and the Orient is in your blood.
    Your voice is weary.
"There are no skilled laborers" you say, "Among
    the owners no coöperation.
It is like—like working in a nightmare, here in China.
    It drags at me, it drags"….
You bow me out with great civility.
The furnaces, the great steel furnaces, tremble and
    glow, gigantic machinery clanks and in living
    iridescent streams the white-hot slag pours out.

Beyond the gate the filth begins again.
A beggar rots and grovels, clutching at my skirt with
    leprous hands. A woman sits sorting hog-bristles;
    she coughs and sobs.

The stench is sickening.

To-morrow! did they say?

Hanyang

Spring

The toilet pots are very loud today.
It is spring and the warmth is highly favorable to fermentation.
    Some odors are unbelievable.

At the corner of my street is an especially fragrant
    reservoir. It is three feet in diameter, set flush
    with the earth, and well filled.
Above it squats a venerable Chinaman with a face such
    as Confucius must have worn.
His silk skirt is gathered daintily about his waist, and
    his rounded rear is suspended in mid-air over the
    broken pottery rim.
He gazes at me contemplatively as I pass with eyes in
    which the philosophy of the ages has its dwelling.

I wonder whether he too feels the spring.

Wusih

Meditation

In all the city where I dwell two spaces only are wide
    and clean.
One is the compound about the great church of the
    mission within the wall; the other is the courtyard
    of the great factory beyond the wall.
In these two, one can breathe.

And two sounds there are, above the multitudinous crying
    of the city, two sounds that recur as time recurs—the
    great bell of the mission and the
    whistle of the factory.
Every hour of the day the mission bell strikes, clear,
    deep-toned—telling perhaps of peace.
And in the morning and in the evening the factory
    whistle blows, shrill, provocative—telling surely
    of toil.
Now, when the mulberry trees are bare and the wintry
    wind lifts the rags of the beggars, the day shift
    at the factory is ten hours, and the night shift
    is fourteen.
They are divided one from the other by the whistle,
    shrill, provocative.
The mission and the factory are the West. What
    they are I know.

And between them lies the Orient—struggling and
    suffering, spawning and dying—but what it is
    I shall never know.

Yet there are two clean spaces in the city where I dwell,
    the compound of the church within the wall, and
    the courtyard of the