Perhaps it will bring me luck, who knows? 
It is a very sacred well. 
Or perhaps, when it is quite dark, someone who is
    hungry.... 
Then the luck will be his!

  The Village of the Mud Idols

The Abandoned God

In the cold darkness of eternity he sits, this god who
    has grown old. 
His rounded eyes are open on the whir of time, but
    man who made him has forgotten him.

Blue is his graven face, and silver-blue his hands.  His
    eyebrows and his silken beard are scarlet as the
    hope that built him. 
The yellow dragon on his rotting robes still rears itself
    majestically, but thread by thread time eats its
    scales away,
And man who made him has forgotten him.

For incense now he breathes the homely smell of rice
    and tea, stored in his anteroom;
For priests the busy spiders hang festoons between his
    fingers, and nest them in his yellow nails. 
And darkness broods upon him. 
The veil that hid the awful face of godhead from the
    too impetuous gaze of worshippers serves in decay
    to hide from deity the living face of man,
So god no longer sees his maker.

Let us drop the curtain and be gone! 
I am old too, here in eternity.

  Pa-tze-kiao

The Bridge

The Bridge of the Eight Scholars spans the canal narrowly. 
On the gray stone of its arch are carvings in low relief,
    and the curve of its span is pleasing to the eye. 
No one knows how old is the Bridge of the Eight
    Scholars.

In our house-boat we pass under it.  The boatman
    with the rat-like face twists the long broken-backed
    oar, churning the yellow water, and we creep forward
    steadily. 
On the bridge the village is assembled.  Foreign devils
    are a rarity. 
The gold-brown faces are not unfriendly, merely curious. 
    They peer in rows over the rail with grunts
    of nasal interest. 
Tentatively, experimentally, as we pass they spit down
    upon us.  Not that they wish us ill, but it can be
    done, and the temptation is too great.

We retire into the house-boat. 
The roof scrapes as we pass under the span of the
    Bridge of the Eight Scholars.

  Pa-tze-kiao

The Shop

(The articles sold here are to be burned at funerals for the use of the dead in the spirit world.)

The master of the shop is a pious man, in good odor
    with the priests. 
He is old and honorable and his white moustache
    droops below his chin. 
Mencius, I think, looked so.